David Norris (Independent)

I move amendment No. 25:

In page 44, before Schedule 1, to insert the following new section:

33.—That the Government shall make provision analogous to that under which house owners were facilitated in buying out ground rents to allow telephone subscribers to buy out the telephone line to their address.".

I made a mistake. The amendment ruled out of order related to people recording one's telephone calls without one's permission, which is a disgrace. I will communicate with the Minister about it. It is outrageous that when one telephones a State agency, the gas company or the like, one is told one's telephone call may be recorded for training purposes. They are not paying me for training anybody. I am not prepared to train them. It is a private telephone call. I will ask the Minister to examine this practice. The Cathaoirleach is quite correct that it is not directly relevant to the Bill.

Amendment No. 25 is. I thought the Cathaoirleach had ruled it out of order and I am glad he has not. As the Minister knows, Eircom is a disaster. It has behaved extremely badly. The flotation was a mess, then Mr. O'Reilly got in, took what he wanted and flogged it to an Australian pension fund. The Irish taxpayer installed those lines but they will pay for them forever. That is absurd. This Government, as a republican government, quite correctly abolished ground rents and gave Irish citizens the right to buy themselves out of the abusive position whereby landlords, in perpetuity, claimed the right to bleed people for ground rent every year and provided no service whatever.

The Irish taxpayer has provided the telephone lines. Most of the time the lines are defective. In my home I can usually tell what the weather outside is by picking up the telephone. If it is not working, it is probably raining. The lines have out of date connections that were put in by the Irish Government. There should be a once-off payment or people should be empowered to buy their own lines and accept responsibility for them.

This mad notion of dismantling all the State services and utilities, privatising them and making a god out of competition is to the disadvantage of the ordinary citizen. The craze about competition does not achieve what was intended. As a result, one cannot get the telephone company to repair a telephone line. It accepts no responsibility. It will recommend a franchised service, and one gets different people all the time. Each of them will give different excuses, such as, "I would not have done it that way" or "That is not the correct way to do it" or "We are waiting for a part". It is the usual absolute rubbish. One does not get proper service, the lines are often faulty, it takes ages to get repair people to call and there are no proper telephone line repair people. The service is franchised and one does not know with whom one is dealing and those people do not accept ultimate responsibility. They bounce back the problem to the customer.

If one tries to get something done with the wiring that was originally installed by the then Department of Posts and Telegraphs, the company will not even send a person to deal with the problem. One must find somebody in the Golden Pages to do it. If the Government believes in privatisation, let it privatise the lines. Allow ordinary people to buy their own telephone lines in order that they will not be required to pay for them in perpetuity. Let us say the rent for the line is €20 per month. That amounts to €240 per year, in perpetuity, for people doing nothing to lines they did not install in the first place. They simply bought them as an investment.

I urge the Minister to act on his good republican instincts and allow Irish people to end this absurdity. Let us pay for the services we get and not be subservient to the multinational corporations as we were once subservient to the imperial ruling class.