Eugene Murphy (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am delighted this matter is being taken, and I want to thank the Acting Chair and the Minister of State, Deputy Smyth for coming in. I want to thank the Minister of State for the work he is doing on the national broadband plan. It is a very ambitious plan, and I know he is very enthusiastic about it. I want to acknowledge that, while I have a difficult situation here, there are broadband connections going on in Roscommon at the moment to several thousand homes and businesses. Several thousand have been connected. I want to be clear on that. This is not a criticism or a suggestion that there is nothing happening. There is stuff happening.

I want to talk about a specific firm, the Hanly Quarries group in Elphin, County Roscommon. I know it very well. It is a producer and supplier of all grades of stone, readymixed concrete, concrete blocks and tarmacadam. At present, it supplies eight county councils with materials, as well as many large construction firms. It has a strong presence in the rural construction market within the midlands and west. With more than 50 years of trading experience, and an annual turnover of €20 million, Hanly Quarries is one of the largest independent employers in the midlands and west. It currently employs 120 full-time employees, and it has a very good track record when it comes to supporting local projects and the community in general.

In recent years, the company has had ongoing issues, particularly with its phone lines going down. This has been due to lightning - our weather has disimproved in that regard, as there is a lot more lightning nowadays than there used to be - but also wear and tear. This year, the company tells me, has been by far the worst in terms of downtime. Since the beginning of the year, its phones have been down for more than 22 business days, and we are just halfway through the year. As a medium for communication and, most importantly, sales, the company's phone lines are its number one source. It is utterly reliant on them, and so far this year the company estimates it has lost €500,000 in turnover due to the issues with landlines, and customers not being able to make contact.

At the moment, the company still has lines down. It has informed me that it has a primary rate interface, PRI system coming into the internal photovoltaic, PV box on site for the exchange. However, maintenance and repair staff from Open Eir have told us that the infrastructure used to service this is antiquated, and parts are no longer being replaced. In fact, they tell the company that they cannot find the parts to replace the existing hardware, new or second-hand. The company has been also told that if the lines go down again, Open Eir will most likely not be able to replace the parts.

As the Minister of State knows, the phone companies are moving to Voice over Internet Protocol, VoIP, which will make PRIs and analog lines redundant. The phone companies are urging us to go this route, but our issue is with broadband speed. The broadband speeds are met, at present, through a radio frequency with Viatel. The best speed that it or any other service provider can provide is 10 MB download and 2 MB upload, which is barely enough to service this business. At present, Hanly Quarries has constant issues with Internet banking when trying to do weekly wages. This is a shocking scenario, where firms are in the middle doing the weekly wages on the system, and then all of a sudden it stops, or is not good enough to deliver.I do not know what we can do for the firm but it is a huge problem for it. It is a significant employer in our area. It is one of the biggest and it needs the best phone line and best broadband service available. I await the Minister of State's reply. I acknowledge the work he is doing on the broadband situation.