Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I have answered questions on this topic this afternoon. Perhaps I can summarise my response. The Department of Communications, Climate Action and the Environment wrote to Eir this morning to seek clarity on a number of aspects of what its representatives told the committee yesterday. There is a big gap between the bid they made only a year ago and what they told the committee. Eir made a bid of €2.7 billion, which was slightly higher than the bid made by Granahan McCourt. When it pulled out, the company had complaints about the high risks and the level of Government oversight requested, and it refused to give any guarantee in respect of the amount of equity it would put into the project. The Deputy will recall that there was a lot of criticism of the fact that Granahan McCourt is not putting in enough equity. Eir would not commit to putting in any equity at all. We have to take what was said yesterday seriously. The Department has written to Eir looking for clarity on a number of different issues. I hope it will respond quickly enough for the Deputy to get its replies before the committee finishes its deliberations. One key concern of ours is the difference between the €1 billion Eir talked about yesterday and its €2.7 billion bid. We want to understand how that can be explained. We would have concerns if that would involve higher user charges and higher connection costs for people in rural Ireland because one of the key objectives of the national broadband plan is to provide the 500,000 homes, farms and businesses in rural Ireland with broadband without connection charges or fees higher than those paid in urban Ireland. If the difference is being borne by people in rural Ireland, we need to know that and we need to know how much they will be expected to pay under the Eir plan.

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