Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will detail some of the issues that have been brought up and perhaps we could get them dealt with. NBI is going to use the infrastructure of Eir and the ESB. It believes at this stage that Eir and the ESB probably need to up their capacity to be able to follow on from NBI but the relationship with Eir and ESB, NBI tell me, is actually very good at the minute. However, we are talking about survey, design and build and we are hoping that, as I think the Tánaiste said, this could be reduced from seven years to four or five, possibly.

The Safepass issue for contractor teams that need to come in must be dealt with. That is the reason some of them are not being brought in. We also need to look at the fact that if we need to bring in people from abroad it means we might be lacking skillsets here.

On tree-trimming, obviously the Minister of State herself has said that Covid has held up operations. There must be a moratorium because if this is necessary the tree-trimming required for dealing with this absolutely necessary infrastructure just needs to happen. Sometimes planning permits are required and we may need a new system, as it was put to me that the one we have is a stop-start system. If one suddenly needs to put in a new planning application because a problem has appeared with a particular pole then one must start the planning process again. With Transport Infrastructure Ireland, TII, that can take upwards of four to eight weeks, as I said. Even with the local authority, in a perfect situation it can be done in two days but again it can take from six to eight weeks. NBI have these guidelines that is trying to operate across the board to reduce this but we need to put in place a system that will steamline this and will operationalise it. This is probably not the forum to deal with this but if the Minister could come back to me on it, we could find a solution to streamline this. It is just too important, we need delivery and at the end of the day the Minister has responsibility.

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