David Norris (Independent)

——why this had not been addressed in legislation. When told it had been addressed, he said he knew that. If he knew it, why did he ask the idiotic question to which he already knew the answer?

Will the Leader raise again the issue of line rental for telephone services. Our charges are the highest in Europe — I have raised this matter repeatedly. We nationalised ground rents and abolished them in the name of the Republic so why can we not abolish line rentals? Eircom is a company which was asset stripped, picked dry as a herring bone and tossed back into the marketplace by one of our leading capitalists, and now people are demanding the renationalisation, at public expense, of this facility. Charges here are 66% above the average for line rental and, under the guise of capitalism, there has been no investment in broadband whatever.