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

There are 227 deployment areas. They do not match the boundaries of townlands. They split across many administrative boundaries. There is a situation where at the border of a deployment area, one house will be connected and another house is in a later phase. That is frustrating for anybody in that situation. That is a consequence of the design. Part of the design is that construction happens in every county simultaneously. That was a political decision at the start. From an engineering point of view, one might have started in one place and gone outwards, but it was decided that construction would happen everywhere for equity. How do we speed it up? Do we need more resources? I visited the headquarters of KN Network Services and asked if it wanted the Government to be involved in training more people for installation. I have spoken to all the different commercial providers, to the subcontractors of NBI, and to NBI. There are problems getting staff and training people in every sector of the economy. I want to make sure that there is a pipeline of people available so that if, in a year, we want to deploy twice as many crews, those crews and vehicles will be available, as will machines such as poling machines for telegraph poles, of which only so many are available in the country.

I am doing everything that I can to accelerate the broadband plan, first, to get it back on track and then to move it faster. A year ago, I was one of the only people in the country who was very optimistic about the roll-out of the vaccination programme. At that time, everybody felt it was going to take years. In fact, it was very successful.

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