Shane Ross (Independent)

The Minister of State will agree the sting is always in the tail.

I am disappointed by the Government's response to this motion. I am disappointed in the Minister of State's reply but I am also disappointed in the amendment to the motion. I cannot understand why the Government has taken this somewhat hands-off attitude in its amendment, as though this was somebody else's responsibility. In the Minister of State's speech, apart from placing responsibility on me, he has also put responsibility on virtually every other possible entity involved in communications regulation. This is ultimately not a responsibility of anyone except the Government. In other countries it is the government which has taken the initiative and has pushed broadband and it is the government which has forced broadband down the throats of the nation for the good of the economy. The extraordinary laissez-faire attitude by this Government to this issue is completely out of synch with the Minister's attitude in other industries and other areas and I do not understand it.

The Government's amendment to the motion recognises that the market is regulated where necessary by the Commission for Communications Regulation, ComReg, the statutory body responsible for the regulation of the sector. It was set up by the Government. The amendment recognises that telecommunications services including broadband are provided in Ireland by the electronic communications sector operated in a fully liberalised market. This means that we do not like interfering in this market. This is nonsense. The Government is happy to interfere in any market it likes if it thinks it will be of some electoral benefit. Just because it has not felt electorally yet the broadband bite on its shoulder, it is being very laissez-faire about this attitude. I do not think the Government is right. This matter is far too important in the long term to ignore.

The Government's current obsession with short-term benefits and short-term issues, means that broadband is to a large extent regarded as the responsibility of someone else. If it goes wrong, it will be Eircom's fault; otherwise it is up to the regulator. The Government is hands-off and detached from this problem. This problem can be resolved very quickly by Government initiative. As Senator Ryan pointed out so articulately, the figures are absolutely damning. Whatever statistics the Minister of State produced — and they are very few — the gap is widening. The Minister of State is correct that we are improving a bit but the other sophisticated nations of the world in terms of technology are going ahead even faster than we are. The gap is widening and as a result we are falling further behind. We are in terrible danger in the area of high-tech PCs and the Internet of being so smug about our economic success that we are ignoring this Achilles heel in our economic success and in our economic future.

The Minister of State must have spoken to many chief executives, marketeers and observers of the multinationals coming here. They must regularly say that the twin pillars of a young population and the tax regime are working and that they love it, but they question the availability of broadband. We will never know how many multinationals and how much foreign investment is lost because other countries, including some of the accession countries, are improving faster than we are. The real danger is that the infrastructure for the future is something we cannot repair too quickly. We are all right on the other two issues but on this one we are in danger of falling behind very quickly.

The Minister of State referred to a knowledge economy. I have never been quite sure what that means, but I know it is a pretty good phrase. It is something we like throwing around so we can say we are quite good at services, educating people and distributing information. However, there is no point in having a knowledge economy if the knowledge is not distributed properly or we do not compete in distributing the knowledge properly.

We are falling behind. We may have a knowledge economy, but we cannot market it properly because we do not have sufficient broadband resources. I am staggered by the smugness and blindness of the Government side to this particular problem, which is staring us in the face and will come back and bite us in the near future.

I know the economy is prospering, that the Government has done wonderful things in the tax area and that we have a wonderful young population. However, I also know that this is an area where other countries are catching up on us, pointing out our future problems, and indicating that we are falling behind in the European league. I hope we will no longer depend on the communities, as we have done so much. We should no longer depend on the regulator or blame the incumbent. We should have the three As that I spoke about in my opening speech.

We should firstly have awareness, an education programme in every school and a PC and broadband in every sixth form. We should have a system similar to that which worked in Northern Ireland, involving Government investment, if necessary, and subsidies to ensure that every household has broadband availability.