Feargal Quinn (Independent)

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. This debate was sought by Senator Ross, who has strong views on this issue, and I support him in those views.

I first came across this issue in Singapore, a place that has always impressed me. Singapore singled out the opportunity in Asia to become the centre for knowledge creation using the Internet. I came home excited about that and stood in the Seanad eight years ago, telling the Minister at the time about Singapore, saying we could be the same but we must put broadband in place. If we had focused on it, we could have achieved it but we have not.

I did not realise how bad things were until my son, who is very interested in technology, told me about going to Clare and being unable to get over the lack of provision. He said it was like sightseeing on a penny farthing after driving a Jaguar. He asked how people could live with the frustration involved.

I did not realise it was so important until I met a neighbour of mine in Howth. He cannot get broadband, which demonstrates a failure on the part of the Government. The Government's attention was drawn to the problems and the opportunities but it did nothing about them.

Senator Mooney is correct in saying there was a dramatic increase last year but it was from a tiny base. It is so easy to have such an increase in such circumstances, so it is understandable. However, I do not want to spend my time criticising what went wrong back in 1997 when Telecom Éireann was privatised. The real reason we failed in broadband goes back to what happened in that year when we did not take steps to do something about it. We can do something about it now, however, although I am not sure what.

I liked Senator Mooney's explanation of what we may have to do. It may be possible to do something by using the State to influence a commercial company, be it Eircom or not. This can be done by tax incentives or other financial incentives in some form or another. We have to do something like this. Let us examine what happened in Northern Ireland where only a few months ago they decided that everybody was going to have a broadband address. A previous speaker said that practically every home in Northern Ireland had broadband.