Willie O'Dea (Limerick City, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Deputy McNamara anticipated what I was going to say and I may be able to be of some assistance to him. Many of my constituents, both businesses and people working from home, in the periphery of Limerick city, in places like Castletroy, Castleconnell, Drombanna and Ballyneety, have been seriously discommoded by the lack of a fast broadband service. I did some research on it and have been informed that National Broadband Ireland, the company commissioned to do this work, has been operating for almost two years. It has received €133 million in Exchequer funds and so far it has only directly connected 2,700 houses to high-speed broadband. The commitment it gave was that at the end of next January, it would have 115,000 houses passed for that purpose. That was reduced to 60,000 because of Covid. According to the information available to me, the number at present is approximately 17,000. My question to the Taoiseach is: what does the Government propose to do to expedite this process? At this rate of progress it will 100 years before broadband is extended to the rest of the country.

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