Officials from the Departments of Rural and Community Development and Environment, Climate and Communications will be quizzed on Wednesday about delays in rolling out the National Broadband Plan (NBP).
Speaking ahead of the meeting, deputy Denis Naughten said he has correspondence from families who received updates from National Broadband Ireland (NBI) during the summer stating “they will be connected to the high-speed fibre network in autumn 2021”.
“Yet they have now received a further update in the last few weeks telling them they have been pushed to the end of the build programme and will be waiting until 2026 for a connection,” the deputy said.
“Officials will be asked to explain what is happening with the delivery of the plan and the communications strategy around it.
“I have received a number of similar stories from different parts of my constituency and I would be surprised if this problem is confined to Roscommon and Galway. This is just not good enough.
“The current Programme for Government, published after Covid-19 hit, promised to fast-track the delivery of high-speed broadband to every home in Ireland but all we have seen since then is delay after delay, using Covid-19 as the scapegoat.
“It seems that not only has there been no effort to fulfil the Programme for Government commitment, but at least some of the slippage in timelines has been because of a lack of coordination across government departments.”
Deputy Naughten added that the individual stories from families “come on top of the disclosure last week in Budget 2022 that the NBP is now running eight months behind schedule”.
“That’s a further two months behind the timeline presented to the Oireachtas communications committee by the contractor just last month,” he concluded.
A target had been set to connect 115,000 premises to high-speed broadband by the end of this year, however, this figure is expected to be 60,000, the Oireachtas committee was told in September.
Today (Tuesday, October 19), the Joint Committee on Transport and Communication will observe the deployment of the NBP project during a site visit to NBI facilities in counties Dublin and Wicklow.
Members of the committee will visit NBI’s offices in Citywest followed by a multi-site field trip to the Blessington Deployment Area.