National Broadband Plan
Dail Éireann — 2021-06-01
============================================================

Ossian Smyth (GP), Dún Laoghaire

Since the pandemic, the national broadband programme and its importance have been underlined for everybody. When the programme was first introduced, there were debates on whether it represented value for money, but at this stage it is well understood by everybody that broadband is essential to the running of commerce and government, and even social networks. The original objective was to implement the national broadband plan within seven years. The Government has committed to reviewing this and to finding a way to reduce the term to five years. With that in mind, considerable progress has been made with the suppliers and through Departments and negotiation on finding a way to reduce the period from seven years to five. There will be announcements in this regard shortly.

---

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/dail/2021-06-01/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:49:21+00:00
Sitting date: 2021-06-01