Paschal Mooney (Fianna Fail)

That is what I was going to say but I did not want to upset the Senator too much. Using throwaway phrases such as "real countries" is lowering the tone of the debate but we will not joust on that.

According to the latest information, there were 372,000 broadband subscribers in Ireland by the end of June. By mid-September that figure had gone up to 410,000. This is equivalent to 9.27% of the population or 26.57% of households in Ireland. It was only 3% of the population at the start of 2005. That is progress. Even Roy Keane would be more than happy to suggest that is real progress. I have another statistic which goes back to Senator Ryan's barb about real countries. Perhaps he was talking about the Netherlands.