Feargal Quinn (Independent)

I welcome the Minister and the Bill, although it is, perhaps, ten years too late. I am very impressed at what Senators Finucane and Kenneally have been able to determine from the Bill. I do not see myself as someone who is expert in this area, as regards going through the Bill and recognising the challenges it presents. I recall the time, 25 years ago, or more, when I became chairman of An Post and there was a great rivalry within the old Department of Posts and Telegraphs involving postal staff who would be left behind in what was regarded as the second cousin or the poor relation. An Post people thought their company would be a poor relation to the new sexy modern Telecom Éireann. In fact, Telecom Éireann was very far behind due to the lack of investment over many years before that. Our hopes were high for what could be achieved in the years ahead.

I am disappointed when I reflect on the direction in which we have gone, especially taking account of the Lisbon Agenda. It outlines that we intend to be the new knowledge-based competitive market in Europe. When I reflect on the progress we have made, I discover that while we thought we had skipped a generation in the 1980s and would have in place a modern telecommunication system, it appears others have moved even faster. I welcome the Bill on the basis that it is an attempt to close that gap.

I pose two questions in regard to the Bill, namely, will it help us to become more competitive and will it create more competition in which I am a great believer? I come from a background where competition is crucial. When I observe the changes that have taken place in other businesses, I examine this area from that point of view.

We first began passing laws to regulate the communications sector in 1997, ten years ago, and our history has been consistent across our successive attempts to control this sector, namely, we have been too timid, too shortsighted and too unaware of the vast importance to the nation of what we were dealing with. Today we are paying the price for what I regard as those shortcomings over those years.

In our approach to regulating communications we have been slow to realise this is not only a commercial matter of simply holding the ring between rival commercial interests and seeing that fairness is guaranteed between them. That is not enough. I spoke on this area ten years ago. That was a fair description of the approach taken in the first of these Acts, namely, to be fair to the different competitors. I pointed out at the time that this was far too passive a role for the State to take. I argued there was a clear public interest in how the communications sector developed in this country. It was not a matter of indifference to the State how the sector developed. I took that view because I believed then that the economic future of this country could depend crucially on the extent to which we could harness the new potential of communications to develop our role in the emerging new knowledge society that is outlined in the Lisbon Agenda.

My belief has proved to be right. If anything, I underestimated the importance the sector would have. However, my views were not listened to in 1997 and, as a result, we were saddled with legislation that proved ineffective in regulating the communications sector. From the beginning it was clear that the regulator had not been given a proper hand to deal with it. In terms of the legislative powers at his disposal, he had a great difficulty. This weakness was immediately recognised by the commercial players involved who engaged the regulator in a long series of lawsuits that were designed to challenge his regulatory powers and to confine them as much as possible.

Many court decisions went against the regulator, but that was not the fault of the regulator or the courts, rather it was our fault in that weak legislation was the cause of that problem. The result has been that the communications sector in this country has been run for the past decade entirely from the viewpoint of the short-term commercial interests of the players involved. The national interest has not got a look-in, rather it has been blatantly ignored and perhaps defied on many occasions.

Nowhere has this been more true than in the roll-out of broadband. It is clearly in the national interest that this should have taken place long ago. Some other countries have done a much better job and we are very far behind them in this area.