A failure that engenders more failure - Poor broadband performance

THE ageless folk tale, ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’, is one of the most enduring in the European tradition. Its message seems particularly relevant to Ireland, as the sharp, darkening nights of autumn loom. 

In that parable, a village boy lied so often about an imminent wolf attack that when his warnings were justified his disbelieving neighbours ignored them and were therefore far more vulnerable to the wolves than they need have been.

We probably don’t need to prepare to repel a pack of wolves — unless you regard Brexit as a carnivore — but there are so many shortcomings around services that we have become like the disbelieving villagers — we’re worn weary by warnings and complaints. We recoil from the negativity, the confidence-sapping discourse around repeated, avoidable failure. Any discussion on any number of subjects provokes what might be called the Trump Reaction — look away and pretend it’s not there and hope it will go away. Understandable, but probably delusional.

We have a health service that is at once magnificent and dysfunctional; we have a police force that can hardly trust itself; we have an overcrowded third-level education system teetering towards collapse, because we will not face funding issues; we have a housing crisis, because we value property above people; we have a dangerous attitude to climate change, and we have a water policy set by supine politicians cowed by a vociferous minority. These are just the known knowns, but there is so much more to be frustrated about in a rich society that presents itself as modern, dynamic, and can-do. The provision of broadband is another necessity abandoned to the mercies of the market, just like social housing.

A new report finds that our broadband speeds are among the very lowest in Europe. Analysis puts Ireland in 36th place, with an average speed of 13.92Mbps. This places this society very much in the digital dunces’ corner. That this sorry state of affairs persists, after a litany of promises, one more impressive than the other, may provoke the Trump Reaction one more time, but that is hardly good enough.

Decent, reliable broadband has the capacity to change this country, especially marginalised rural areas where people still have to leave to find work — even though technology has made geography irrelevant in so much of modern work. Broadband brings the work to communities, not the other way around. Decent, reliable broadband can also make a real contribution to fighting climate change by allowing ever more people to work from home, thereby reducing the escalating emission rates from the transport sector.

Just like climate change, the day for arguing about broadband is long gone and we need to do much more, much much more, quickly. The recent review of the national plan, which suggested that some locations may have to wait years for broadband, is, in the plainest terms, unacceptable. Every day that swathes of Ireland remain digital backwaters we needlessly surrender advantage to those who long ago embraced the warnings about digital wolves at the door.

Surely, we can do a lot, lot better? We certainly must.