Róisín Garvey (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I will not need the full eight minutes. Tá an tAire Stáit ag obair go dian ar an bhfadhb seo. Is dúshlán mór é atá ann le fada an lá ach, faoi dheireadh, tá rudaí ag tarlú agus tá sé ag bogadh ar aghaidh.

I thank the Minister of State for taking on this role. I know he has been working immensely hard on it. We have had repeated meetings with NBI to see how we can get the entire process speeded up. I see we are now reaching targets beyond those originally set. I take my hat off to the Minister of State. Despite Covid and everything else, it is good to finally see proper acceleration for rural broadband. I cannot emphasise enough how important it is to everything in rural Ireland. As a point of information, Macra na Feirme conducted a rural youth survey and sent a questionnaire to young people in rural areas. Macra has more than 10,000 members. Some 53% of young people said they would stay in their local village or rural area. If there was good Internet access, they would be willing to stay and work from home or in a remote working hub. It is such an key element to ensuring that rural areas remain alive. For too long we have only seen old people and really young people in villages. There was a complete brain drain of the young people who are needed in every village and town. I remember living in Drumcolliher years ago and we started an organic horticulture course. There was a bunch of 20-somethings involved. All the old people in the village kept calling to my house saying it was great to have young people around the village. Bringing broadband to rural areas is akin to bringing colleges and jobs to those places. As we discovered during the pandemic, we can do most things from home. It is interesting that rural broadband could bring so many young people, energy, ideas and innovation to villages and towns, all of which are so badly needed.

It is great that more than 3,600 premises around Kilkishen, Sixmilebridge, Ballyhannon, Cloghlea, Bunratty, Shannon and Spancel Hill are getting fibre broadband. The BCPs are brilliant as well. They are definitely very useful while we are waiting for everybody to get rural broadband, and they will be needed after that. I worked from home for 14 years. I used to check into a digihub even though I had good Internet access at home. That was just to have people around me and so I would not have to look at the laundry. There is an important role to be played by digihubs or BCPs. It is not a case of having one or the other; we need both. It is really good to see them coming on board. In my village of Inagh, we will have a new digihub in the coming weeks. They are scattered all over Clare now. In fairness to the local authority, Clare is leading the way because it has brought it on board. There is a very successful digital hub in Ennistimon, and a brand new one in Ennis. It can make a huge difference to people to have that connection, even those who have been working from home successfully. I work out of the Ennistimon hub and I see the fantastic collaboration that is coming out of it. People are working with each other and creating new ideas within the framework provided by rural digihubs.

I want to ask the Minister of State a couple of questions. A case was put by a neighbour of mine, who got more than 120 householders to agree that they would all sign up to fibre broadband. I do not know how NBI works to prioritise where it goes, who gets fibre and when, but I am curious to hear a bit about that. If we have 70 households, for example, to buy into it, is it more attractive then for NBI to have to go to each individual house in the hope that it will link in with it? It must be worth the company's while financially as well, given that the cost is the main challenge in bringing rural broadband to individual houses that are scattered. It is much easier and cheaper to bring it into an urban area. Could we look at the idea of clusters of houses in a rural area? Even though it is not a town, we could create the equivalent of a town of 120 houses in one small parish if they would sign up to fibre broadband? Is that something that could be prioritised then to be rolled out?

In some places they have got as far as getting the infrastructure in place. The poles are up and everybody is very excited but then it is not linked or turned on. A case in point is Barefield National School, which has 370 pupils and 35 staff but most days they cannot send emails. The pole is outside the door and all the infrastructure is there but for some reason they are not connected. I do not know what that is about.

I would like an explanation of how the relationship between Eir and NBI works. Are they competing or is Eir working under NBI? I seek clarity on that because there seems to be some confusion in that regard as well.