Telecommunications Infrastructure Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-24 ============================================================ Gareth Scahill (FG), Nominated by the Taoiseach There is an issue raising itself across Ireland at the moment. While on the surface it might seem quite minor, in reality, it points to a much deeper failure in how we manage our national infrastructure. Following last year’s storms, communities saw widespread damage to telephone lines. Poles were strained, wires were brought down and networks were disrupted. To their credit, service providers acted quickly. In many cases, lines were restored, connectivity returned and phones and broadband worked again. That is only half the story, however. Across the countryside today, the physical remains of the damage are still there. Wires have been left hanging across roads and farm entrances or they have dropped into ditches, been caught in hedgerows or left trailing alongside boundaries. Critically, this is not just old copper infrastructure; it includes existing telephone wires. It is not simply a legacy issue but a current operational failure. This is not just storm damage but, rather, the consequences of a system where restoring service is prioritised but restoring the environment is not. We have to be honest about what has changed. Telecommunication infrastructure in this country is no longer fully publicly owned. It operates through a privatised model. While that model brings efficiency, it also brings incentives. Once the customer has service restored, the job is effectively considered done. There is no immediate commercial driver to remove redundant copper lines, properly secure or re-route poles and wires, clear debris from roadsides and fields or address infrastructure that is no longer active or properly installed but still physically present. What happens is that we fix what is visible on the bill and ignore what is visible on the ground. This is not just untidy and inconvenient; it is often unsafe. Low-hanging cables pose a risk to farmers trying to access land, machinery moving through gateways and pedestrians and road users. With hedge-cutting season and seasonal work approaching, these risks will only increase. People will avoid working near these lines, and rightly so because no one should have to guess whether a cable is live, inactive or improperly installed. There is, however, a second issue here that is even more concerning, which is that the integrity of the network itself is being put at risk. Where cables are left dragging against trees, loosely installed or poorly tensioned or are exposed to constant movement and weathering, they do not remain harmless. They degrade. Fibre cables in particular are sensitive to bending, strain and repeated stress and some are left sagging or rubbing against branches. We are not just looking at poor workmanship, we are looking at future faults being built into the network. All of this is happening in the context of a broader transition. Ireland is moving from copper to fibre, and that is the right direction, but what we are seeing is a transition that has only been completed halfway. The new network has been rolled out and the old one is being abandoned. In the process, every part of the new one is not being properly secured. This leads to a simple but unavoidable conclusion: we have created a system where there is responsibility for delivering a service but no clear responsibility for the physical condition of the infrastructure delivering it. This does not require a technological solution but it requires a regulatory one. We need a clear obligation to remove redundant infrastructure. We need full clean-up as part of storm recovery, not partial repair. We need proactive inspections, not reliance on individual complaints, and accountability for the physical state of the network and not just whether it works. Infrastructure is not just about connectivity; it is about how the connectivity exists in the real world, in our landscape, our roads and our communities. If we continue as we are we will keep restoring service quickly but we will also continue leaving behind a trail of neglect, one that is unsafe, unsightly and ultimately self-defeating. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-02-24/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:41+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-02-24