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

I recognise there is huge and growing demand for fibre broadband across Ireland, much more than there was two years ago due to the pandemic. Everybody would like it tomorrow. It is a seven-year contract to connect 540,000 homes. We are two years in so there are five years left. A proportion of those homes are due to be connected in years 6 and 7, that is, 2025 and 2026. I can understand that people will be disappointed if they are in an area that is due in 2025 or 2026. That is not true of the whole of Mayo. A total of 11,373 homes have been surveyed in Mayo already and 4,033 are under construction, so they will have their service within a matter of months. Mayo is not one single deployment area but multiple deployment areas.

The Deputy asked what I can do to liaise with NBI. I am taking a very hands-on approach. I have been in nearly every county in Ireland in the past year. I have met the chief executive of NBI, Peter Hendrick, on many occasions. I also attended the two most recent board meetings of NBI. I facilitated a meeting between NBI and Eir's chief executive and chair to ensure I understood what communications there were between the main subcontractor and the contractor itself. I am examining everything we can do to accelerate the project. My absolute focus is on getting the volume of connections up to a point where the project is back on track. It is not okay that we were six months behind after the pandemic and then more months behind because of other delays, or that we announced a number at one point and then had to announce a smaller number within two months. That is going to inspire pessimism in people but I am optimistic. This happens with projects. There is sometimes a valley of doom period where you are very optimistic at the start but then people start to lose faith because they come across all the real-world problems, such as blocked ducts, phone lines that are down, and rivers and railway lines that have to be crossed. We will overcome that, we will accelerate, rejoin and get every home in Ireland connected to fibre-optic broadband. It is an incredibly optimistic and ambitious project but it is not over-ambitious. We are going to bring fibre-optic broadband to every house, premises and farm in Ireland.

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