Michael Fitzmaurice (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Over the past ten years, the national broadband plan has been spoken about, and last year the Tánaiste and other Ministers signed the new contract, which is welcome. The questions with the Minister, Deputy Humphreys, we were dealing with prior to Leaders' Questions were about broadband. Work on this has started in various parts of the country. Some people will say the main contractors got a heavy price or a good price, and it probably is, but I would always say that we need to get broadband in rural Ireland and that is the bottom line.

Worryingly, over recent days in different parts of the country we have heard there have been stand-offs with the polers, who are the people who put up poles. Some of them are back on site again today. Ironically, the first thing that is done in going from pole to pole is to clip the top of hedgerows, the 6% of which we left out of our climate mitigation plans, to make sure the wire does not get cut. Unfortunately, 80% of the contractors throughout the country have pulled off site. They tell us the surveying has been done wrong and the way it has been added up is completely wrong compared with the other providers we have in the country, and we all know them. This is bread-and-butter stuff and there are already stand-offs. There are some parts of the country where a few contractors are working. Other than this, they have all pulled off site. If this has cropped up already, at the beginning of the roll-out of broadband, what measures has the Government put in place to make sure there is oversight of what is going on?

From what I can see, we seem to have a main contractor that does not seem to have a lot of gear or machinery and subcontracts it down, and then it is subcontracted down again and then subcontracted down again. Is there anything in place to make sure the ordinary contractors at the bottom of this ladder are protected and get the proper price for the work they are doing, or is this a big figure for broadband and screw everyone down along? What has the Government put in place to make sure these people are protected?

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