Ossian Smyth (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

The national broadband plan is one of the most ambitious rural broadband plans in the world. I have spoken to Ministers from throughout Europe and nobody is trying to connect every rural home, business and farm to fibre broadband. I expect that by the end of this month, between 50,000 and 60,000 homes in the intervention area will be able to order or preorder fibre broadband to their house for delivery.

We have 121,000 homes that are under fibre broadband construction-build at the moment, and in the past 12 months, ComReg's figures show that 120,000 Irish homes had broadband fibre connections brought into their homes, which is a 50% increase on the number that was there a year before and a 50% increase again on the numbers that were there two years ago. We have a situation where we have for very large providers who are building fibre broadband to the home at speed and as fast as possibly can be done.

See this speech in context