Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Not through the electric cables but they did look at using the electricity network as a basis for rolling it out. That was the alternative SIRO model. There are difficulties, in the context of health and safety, with using an electricity network as opposed to a telephone network. It is not a straightforward option.

Regarding Senator Conway-Walsh's point that it cannot be sold on, it can be but it would be sold on while it continued to be governed by fixed price and it would have to meet all the terms of the contract. This does not in any way dilute the contract. I or my successor must approve the buyer so it cannot hollow out the company in some way to remove equity or the funding base of the company in order to fulfil its capacity. If there is a profit from the sale, we, the taxpayers, get a clawback from that. A great deal of thought has been put into protecting the State in that regard.

Senator Mullen stated that this is Irish politics for you. I do not accept that. I have been under sustained pressure - in the Dáil and everywhere else - to ensure that we explored every option before I brought a recommendation to Government and to bring that recommendation forward as quickly as possible. The Taoiseach indicated that he wanted it by Easter. I brought it forward as close to that deadline as I could. From the debate, we can see that this is not a big campaigning issue. There are as many people who are unhappy with it as there are happy with it but, unlike the Senator, I am strongly of the view that 25 years from now we will look back at it as being more like free second-level education. How could anyone say that introducing free second-level education was not a good thing to do? In 25 years' time, people will ask how anyone could have thought that providing 146,000 km of fibre - something that can carry information at the speed of light - was a bad decision, particularly if our aim was to have balanced regional development.

I would not be as reverent as Senator Craughwell when it comes to the views of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. It is entitled to

provide advice but that advice is among a series of advices that the Government must evaluate and make a decision on the basis of. Regarding the reflection that the decision to privatise Telecom Éireann was wrong, it may have been. Many other states took the same approach at that time so the decision was not unique. In retrospect, to have sold the spine of a service as important as that relating to telecommunications was a mistake but that is where matters stand. We must use state aid judiciously to deliver the service to which people in rural Ireland are entitled. It is not just rural areas in Cork. I know that there are many remote places in Cork but there are 10,000 people in Dublin who will benefit from what is being done. There are remote areas in every county, so this is not about rural Ireland versus Dublin. There are people in every county who are affected.

Another of my responsibilities that is even bigger than this is talking about how we build a sustainable country that can decarbonise. This is one of the infrastructures that will underpin our capacity to decarbonise our economy because if we can do business remotely, including diagnostics and education, and do not have to have all those trips into the city or to the chemist, for example, we will have more sustainable and better communities. That is a side of this which, obviously, does not enter the cost-benefit ratio that was analysed but it is a reality of why we are doing this sort of thing.