Broadband Infrastructure
Dail Éireann — 2026-05-14
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Maeve O'Connell (FG), Dublin Rathdown

Gabhaim buíochas leis an Aire Stáit for his reply. He mentioned a couple of things in his response about market failures, which is what the national broadband plan sought to address. I would argue that what we are dealing with here in all of the areas I highlighted in Stillorgan, Foxrock and Cabinteely are market failures. They are, to use the Minister of State's own terminology, "gigabit service-challenged areas". People cannot work from home in these areas. The current service is completely insufficient.
I welcome that the Department is working very closely with the commercial operators. I would be interested to know what information is being gathered in that regard. Are all of these areas being identified and listed? Are they being measured and assessed?
On identifying all of those black spots, what is the plan around that? Is there a plan? The Minister of State said that the NBP was going to come in under budget. Will that budget be transferred to address the remaining black spots or will we be looking for a new plan, working with the commercial operators, or a sort of mini-national broadband plan or national broadband plan phase 2 to try to address these gaps?
These things are very important. The timeline is important to my residents. They have been listening to this story about roll-outs and the success stories, with towns and villages across the country being celebrated as great successes, yet they continue to have no service and they have no timeline as to when they are going to get a service.
The Minister of State works in the Department of enterprise. I refer him to my earlier comments about the percentage of people working from home in my constituency and the percentage of businesses there that are not online. Thus, there are opportunities that we are missing simply because we do not have sufficient urban broadband throughout Dublin Rathdown.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-05-14/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:56+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-05-14