Brendan Ryan (Labour)

Slow, late and inadequate is the only way to describe it. Our telecommunications infrastructure is a mess. We should be looking to what telecommunications will be like in 20 years' time instead of being last behind places like Estonia and Hungary and wondering why modern telecommunications and other industries are moving to those countries rather than staying here.

We go on about cost competitiveness, which I acknowledge is not unimportant, but there are all sorts of factors entirely within the Government's hands and one of those is telecommunications infrastructure. From the series of astonishing admissions in the Minister of State's speech, we know what the problem is. A private sector quasi-monopoly has been bullying ComReg for four or five years, doing what it liked, and unable to be dealt with. It is now whingeing to people about the possibility of significant penalties. This is the core of the matter.

I know that some people in the Government share my view that it was a mistake to privatise the infrastructure and the solution ought to have been to keep the telecommunications infrastructure in public ownership and to privatise the service providers. That is my view. To see the classic and ultimate example of what the private sector does when it has an infrastructure monopoly is to go out to the WestLink any day of the week and watch the most glorious rip-off the State has ever invented. It is a bad service at an exorbitant price making enormous amounts of money and which will have to be bought out at a cost which will nearly equal the cost of the tribunals which worried so many people on the Order of Business this morning.