Mairéad Farrell (Galway West, Sinn Fein)
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540. To ask the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment how his Department is working with communications companies to ensure improvement in their infrastructure; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [40278/25]

Patrick O'Donovan (Limerick County, Fine Gael)
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My Department is focused on learning lessons from Storm Éowyn to ensure that there is much better coordination between those who have a role to play in making communication infrastructure more resilient for next winter.

I have met with and written to both mobile and fixed telecoms providers on the measures they are taking to build further resilience into these networks and made it clear that there must be a significant improvement in response times to restore services following future storm events.

In pursuit of these goals, officials in my Department have met with industry, ComReg and government stakeholders to discuss a broad range of topics, including how communications operators will improve the resilience of their networks and to develop an effective and unified response to future incidences. These actions include;

• efforts to harden the networks in advance of storms, such as having more batteries at mobile sites and strengthening masts to withstand severe wind gusts;
• development of clear protocols, communications and escalation paths to deal with the damage and disruption that will inevitably occur notwithstanding investments in hardened infrastructure, including vegetation management before and after storms;
• identifying priority sites for hardening and response that can provide a basic level of emergency connectivity to most of the population in the event of a similar extreme event;
• the establishment of a Telecommunications Response and Resilience Group (T-RRG) to bring all stakeholders together to progress these actions.