Broadband provision - Greater urgency is needed

Anyone over 40 will remember a time when, if you were moving into a new house, you had to order a phone and maybe wait for up to a year before one was installed.

Until that happy day arrived you lived more or less incommunicado, or wrote letters. In today’s on-demand culture that seems almost pre-Victorian but at least the phones worked when they were installed. Today’s version of that sorry story is, despite Government promise after Government promise from Government after Government, the fact that swathes of Ireland do not have a basic, reliable broadband service. Whole areas of the country — the one depending on a knowledge-based economy for its rejuvenation — are excluded from modern life as well as the glories and essentials of a connected, interactive world.

Some of these broadband dead zones are remote but very many are suburban areas less than ten miles from major urban centres. Despite this, and despite persistent, forceful efforts — not to mention innumerable calls to call centres at the other end of the earth — many tens of thousands of homes and businesses, schools too, are condemned to a communications never-never-land where the broadband service might or might not work. This is an unacceptable barrier to business, education and the simple human process of being part of the social media revolution changing our world faster than you can say interconnectivity.