Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am just joking. I am not sure how I can do justice to this topic in five minutes. I welcome it. However, in a sense, we are putting the cart before the horse. At the moment, there is a committee meeting going on, or it has just finished, where the CEO and the committee are teasing out very important issues, and the Committee of Public Accounts is due to have an appearance by the CEO on 10 February. I would have thought that, rather than speaking in a vacuum today, some of the issues we highlighted would be crystallised and we would have a better chance at that stage.

On this page I have in front of me, I have a list of various places ar fud Conamara, inar cuireadh in iúl dom nach bhfuil an córas ag feidhmiú agus go bhfuil muintir na háite thíos ó thaobh easpa leathanbhanda. While I will not read out personal things, I want to refer to the information on the page. At Pairc Láir, An Spideál, four people are trying to work from home in an amber area, the time spent will be two to four years and Sky does not provide a service. At Lochán Beag, it is in an amber area situated on a link road between two complete access fibre ribbons, but they cannot get it. At Knock South, Inverin, five people are working from there, just off the R336, where fibre runs. I could go on.

We spend our time taking these representations. I appreciate the Minister of State who was present earlier, Deputy Ossian Smyth, has taken a hands-on approach, as I am sure has the Minister of State, Deputy Heydon. This begs questions as to why a busy Minister has to take such a hands-on approach when there are all of the officials to run what should be an open and accountable contract without all of this extra effort. I would love to know the price of that. We spend our time putting in representations and fighting to move people along the colour board from blue to amber, and then fighting within that amber to see what year it will be. I will leave that point and use my time to deal with other issues.

I never thought I would stand here and agree with Deputy Alan Farrell. I absolutely agree with him when he belatedly said that, unfortunately, it was an absolute disaster when Telecom Éireann was privatised by flotation back in 1999, given what happened after that. It was a major mistake. We are now investing somewhere between €2.1 billion and €3 billion and, even in itself, that uncertainty is unhelpful. While it was clarified as €2.1 billion in a contract, it is a lot more than that. There is a huge effort from the Department to monitor a contract that we have not seen because, despite the fact the former Minister, Deputy Richard Bruton, said it would be published almost in full, we have not seen it. We are here getting reassurances and talking around in circles, trying to find out how this contract is being implemented and find out about the person fronting it, who appears to have only a 10% share, and all of the other myriad companies behind it. However, let us not bother our little minds about that because it is all too complex for us. It is ironic we are talking about communications and broadband, and facilitating easier communication, while all of the time we are obfuscating, confusing and hiding communication, and making it impossible for ourselves, because we are just ordinary Deputies, to read stuff and ask appropriate questions. It is not possible and the Minister of State knows that. Over and over again, we see various examples of different organisations where the governance has utterly failed - everything from the children's hospital, which had an outside board attached to it to monitor what was going on, to yesterday's terrible report on CAMHS in County Kerry. All of the time, it is governance failing. What do we do? We sign a contract that is too complex for the ordinary Deputy to understand.

Belatedly, we then put in a public service director, or whatever the correct title is. She was put in almost a year later. What is the role of that woman? Has she come back and reported to the Government in regard to various issues? What issues have arisen? I understand the problem with a public director is that his or her duty is to the company, so what is the point of having a public director? I happened to be at one or two meetings initially, when my colleague Deputy Pringle was not available. I asked this very question in regard to the role of a public director and what was going to happen but we have heard nothing since in that regard.

We are here today, looking at something like this, without any connection to the other companies on the ground. We have all met them. We have been overwhelmed with representations from companies on the ground, so we can do it but we are not being facilitated. We have an awful lot of complaints about Eir and we have to continuously pressurise it so that people come off the amber because Eir has finally facilitated them.

My time is up and I have not even approached the issue. While I am not complaining, this is no way to bring openness and accountability to a contract like this.

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