Martin Browne (Tipperary, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I would like to remind Deputy Moynihan - although I agree with him that it has started to roll out - that for every place that he can name, we can name another place that is caught for broadband. We all agree that it should be in new housing estates, but the Government needs to start building those houses first.

This week, the Tánaiste outlined the 13 reasons employers will be able to refuse requests to work from home. A company will be able to do so if it has concerns regarding the Internet connectivity of the proposed remote working location. Maybe the Tánaiste should reword this to reflect the reality of the situation for a number of people who have been in contact with me. Maybe he should include a proviso that employees should refer their requests for home working to NBI, given that the slow pace of the NBI roll-out is leaving many people without options for their work. One man who was offered a job opportunity had to meet a requirement that his Internet connection must have a minimum 20 Mbps download speed and a minimum 10 Mbps upload speed. When he checked his connection, he found he had nowhere near this level. When he checked with his provider, he was told that the infrastructure was not in place. When I inquired on his behalf, I was told that while there is no high-speed broadband at his premises at the minute, as it stands it should be connected up with a full fibre to the home connection by NBI at some stage between May and July of this year. That is real good for him. If the Tánaiste is happy to put job prospects into the hands of NBI, he will encounter some very real problems.

There are also issues of crossover with companies such as Eir. A constituent contacted Eir at the end of last year when a salesman told him that fibre broadband under the NBI scheme was available to his home. When he contacted Eir, they signed him up for an installation. When the day arrived, they advised the customer that there was a porting issue at their end and that it got cancelled in error. They therefore arranged another date. The day before that date, he was told that they could not install it because the infrastructure is not in place for fibre broadband in his area. Since then, Eir and NBI have been telling the customer that it is the fault of the other. While this kind of problem with Eir is no surprise, it is an unacceptable way to deal with a customer and with the roll-out of a service.

I also have concerns for our farming community. More and more farmers are reliant on broadband to effectively manage and resource their farms. Indeed, at the agriculture committee, we heard of the importance of data collection and analysis, which will help to vastly improve environmental management, such as fertiliser spreading, organic manure management and crop harvesting. There is a bit of a road to go in relation to this at the moment. There has been a lack of clarity on the number of farms that have been connected, apart from NBI saying its ambition is to connect 54,000 farms to high-speed broadband. If our farmers are being required to adhere to increasingly technical demands, and if we are to have the capacity to use the technological advances that have been made in recent times, the roll-out of high-speed broadband is crucial for them. While I appreciate that some progress has been made in Tipperary, there are entire counties that have been left out altogether. In the last six months, 28 national schools have gone live and 168 schools are now ready to connect through a retail service provider. Some 99 of those are live out a total of 679 national schools in the intervention area.

Last year, the Government agreed to a remedial plan that involved reducing the number of houses and businesses passed by the end of the year to 60,000. I understand that the number achieved was well below that. Given the significant amount of public money that has been pumped into the NBP, as well as all we have heard about the contract concerns - my colleague Deputy Stanley had warned about this - there needs to be greater regulation of public procurement spending on a range of capital projects about which there are questions regarding spiralling costs.

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