Brian Stanley (Laois, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on the motion. More than seven years ago the Government went down this cul-de-sac with the national broadband plan and we are no further on. The Government has spent €26 million on one tranche of consultants' fees alone without even a metre of cable being laid. It is a farcical situation and reckless in the extreme. We have wasted public money. Any progress made by the private companies, Eir, Vodafone or Imagine has been in spite of Government's plans and actions. The Government has failed rural areas with this national broadband plan.

In Laois, 12,720 homes are still waiting for broadband and the number for Offaly is similar. Some 11,500 people commute from Laois every day to go to work. Some of them could work from home if they had broadband and the same is true for those in Offaly. For the sake of job creation, carbon reduction, better community and family life, we ask the Minister to consider taking a step back from the plan and realise that it is a reckless squandering of taxpayers' money.

I remind the House that the plan is to give €3 billion of taxpayers' money to an American investor with little or no experience in broadband or telecommunications. It is economic madness. The Government needs to recognise that its plan has been banjaxed for a long time. It is obvious to everyone that the plan is on the road to nowhere.

The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform sounded warning bells in the strongest terms possible. I served on the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment for three years. That committee went through this painstakingly and recommended clearly that the Government halt the process it is going through and change tack to doing a public model. There is only one beneficiary of this so far and that is the consultants. If the plan proceeds the beneficiary will be the private entity with which it finished up.

Our amendment proposes that the Government approaches the ESB, a State-owned utility company with a proven track record. It has the infrastructure connected to every home in the State. It is a utility that is already in the broadband game. It is in a position to start rolling out this. We need Government to re-engage with it.

The issue of the state aid rules and the 300,000 picked out by Eir damaged this process as I said on the day it was announced. I asked and I again ask for a copy of the European Commission ruling on state aid at that meeting. I asked for the minutes of that meeting involving Government officials. I still have not received those minutes. Allowing any one party to cherry-pick part of a public project can make it economical for it and that is what happened here. There was a clear case for not allowing that to happen.

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