David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with Deputies Stanley and Fitzmaurice.

The Minister was disingenuous in his opening remarks when responding to the Labour Deputies. He said my party and other Opposition parties were treating people in rural areas of Ireland as second-class citizens; nothing could be further from the truth. Everybody in this House wants people in rural areas to have proper broadband. I remind him that it was not my party that closed post offices, Garda stations or community services in villages. That was down to his party.

He also claimed the Opposition was being irresponsible, but it is the Minister who is being irresponsible. Essentially, he is saying that an expensive, flawed and compromised process should proceed regardless of the outcome and regardless of the cost. He is saying that because we have gone so far despite the concerns of the Opposition, come what may and regardless of how much it will cost the taxpayer, the Government is going ahead with this. That is not responsible; it is highly irresponsible.

The Minister also claimed, as the Government always does, that there is no alternative. Any number of alternatives have been debated in this House and in the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment which published a report citing many of the options the Minister could consider.

In the end the Government came up with a design, build, operate and own model that has been completely discredited by numerous experts and by the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment. In his contribution, Deputy Howlin quoted the analysis of the plan by the Secretary General of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. I also want to quote from a letter he sent to his counterpart at the Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment. In a letter he wrote in April 2019, he stated:

Having expressed our concerns on a number of occasions at this stage in relation to the affordability and value for money of the proposed contract for the National Broadband Plan, I wish to re-emphasise one further time this Department's fundamental concerns in relation to the unprecedented risk that the State is being asked to bear in the event that the current NBP contract is recommended for approval by Government.

In this letter the Secretary General of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform - not the Labour Party, Sinn Féin or anybody else - is saying there is a risk to the taxpayer and it is not the best model. That has happened on the Minister's watch; it is his decision. I also agree with Deputy Howlin who has said this is ideological. The Government had a number of options and decided not to choose them.

Many of the providers who had been in the bidding process appeared before the Committee of Public Accounts. They also talked about the origins of this process and its failures which led to some of them dropping out of the process and led to others not entering the process in the first place. This was an inherently flawed model that was always going to fail. It was always going to lumber the taxpayer with an enormous cost while not owning the infrastructure at the end of it. That is on the Minister's watch. We will not continue to support this simply because Fine Gael made a mess of it. That is not a good enough reason to throw good money after bad.

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