Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I too welcome this Bill. As the previous speaker mentioned, ComReg and the different aspects to this area are something that people struggle with. It is a sad indictment on our country that we meet people in our clinics who mention problems with Eir, which is a complete disaster. People in rural and isolated areas depend for safety and security on pendant alarms and their Eir lines might be down for one, two, three or, sometimes, six months and they cannot get through or navigate the system, especially elderly people. I walked in one day and heard my daughter asking not to be passed to someone else. There was a woman sitting in front of her for an hour and a quarter while she was contacting a company and that woman had to be there to identify herself under GDPR requirements. We were passed from Billy to Jack to Ned to Tom to Mary to Billy and back around the house again and got no resolution. It is so frustrating.

I recently met a nurse in a hospital in Dublin and I had not seen her before as she had just moved back from the UK. She said she used to come over every year to visit her mother for holidays but she never realised things were so bad with utility companies until she came back with her family of four kids, bought a house, which is great, and tried to navigate with the utility companies. She said it is a nightmare compared with the UK. What is wrong with us in our supposedly modern and inclusive State when we are excluding people and discriminating against them? That is especially true of people who are not good at IT - and I am one of those myself - and it is true of older people. I chaired the adult education board and I often gave certificates to 90-year-olds who went back and did their leaving certificate and everything else and it was wonderful to see that but many people are not proficient with electronic gadgets, especially older people as they are not into them. They can barely turn on RTÉ One on the television with the remote control and it is scandalous that they are not looked after. They are neglected and abandoned by these companies and they are paying dearly for the pleasure of being neglected and abandoned. It is very serious and we seem to just pass it off.

We have ComReg and a plethora of other regulators but, honest to God, I wonder sometimes what is their function. They do not seem able to deal with these companies or they suffer from inertia in doing so. They seem unable to get the companies to behave properly.

I am in business, or part of a business, and, thank God, we celebrated 40 years in operation this year. I thank my wife and son for carrying on while I am in this job. We would not have any customers if we behaved the way these companies are behaving. Customer service does not seem to apply to them. I am not blaming the people at the other end of the telephone. That work is often farmed out to different companies, call centres and all the rest of it. It is just sad that people are so frustrated they come to us, as politicians, to the Ombudsman or to the likes of Joe Duffy and other talk show hosts. We hear all the time about the total and utter frustration of people who have been abandoned by the providers of services for which they have paid. They are already paying through their taxes to support many of those services, including the setting up of Eir and the roll-out of broadband. I know people who live 100 m or a little more from a centre that has broadband but they cannot get it and are told it will be two or three years before they do. It is shameful in this modern era.

I was at a Fianna Fáil Ard-Fheis at which the late Albert Reynolds held up one of the big phones we used to have on the hall stand in our house. We were afraid, as children, to go near the phone when we first got it. It was polished twice a week but we were not allowed to touch it. When you dialled, you got through to the local post office, which then put through your call. Albert Reynolds help up the phone and said he would have one of them in everyone's house within a month, which he succeeded in doing. That was in 1978 or 1979. Now, however, people might be waiting indefinitely for a phone line to be installed. ESB, to be fair, has very good customer service and is very good at repairs when there are outages. Their staff go out in all kinds of weathers. The same cannot be said of the other companies, some of which have come and gone. The broadband situation is not acceptable. Timescales are given for roll-out but none of them are met. The companies are supposed to pay huge fines for missing targets but I do not know who is fining them or whether they are paying such fines. Public money is funding the roll-out of broadband. Is the public contributing to the payment of fines as well, while waiting for the broadband to be rolled out? It is quite simply appalling.

It is a sad situation in our modern country that we see young people with smart phones and everything else but ordinary people cannot get services they were used to having. There were great people working in some of those services, including the gangs of men we used to see working for Telecom Éireann and then Eircom. Now, someone might come the distance from Mayo to Clonmel and Cahir to repair an outage or fix a cable. We see the poles rotting and falling into ditches and wires hanging down on top of ditches. It is dangerous. Farmers cannot cut their fences because the wires could get tangled up in their machines. It is scandalous that we have a quasi-public utility whose workers have no pride in their work and whose morale must be very low. There are no staff left. I had a visit on Tuesday from Pádraig Ó Ceallaigh, whose wife, Shirley, works for me. He was a dedicated Eircom and Eir employee all his life. It is a pity for the many like him who gave great service that we are in this situation.

I hope this legislation is not just about ticking a box and passing another Bill, rather than ensuring we have proper regulators with teeth. I do not want to be repetitive but, as I said, it is very frustrating for people to be paying for a service and to be punished by not having that service and having to wait and wait and be fobbed off in trying to resolve it. I hope the legislation will make some impact but I very much doubt it will.

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