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.

It is not overstating the case to say that this communications isolation is a significant factor in unemployment, in driving emigration, the destruction of rural communities and a real barrier to realising opportunity. Because it is not an issue for those who enjoy an acceptable service, it does not get the attention it deserves and is becoming yet another fault line in this society.

Set against this reality, it is difficult to know whether to laugh or cry at the recent Government plan that promises to bring high-speed broadband to close to a million homes and businesses. That scepticism is provoked by the earlier but now abandoned commitment from Communications Minister Pat Rabbitte that every home would enjoy 30 megabits per second broadband by 2015. There are some months to run before that deadline is reached, but as anyone who has been visited by an honest broadband technician will confirm, that is as likely to happen as Ireland winning the World Cup in Brazil.

This situation, as embarrassing as it is frustrating, is rooted in the disastrous Eircom sell-off of 15 years ago. That decision, a reckless Fianna Fáil smash-and-grab, is a salutary lesson on how not to manage vital infrastructure. The consequences of that decision, whole areas of the country more or less abandoned because they do not offer a commercial return, do have a silver lining though — they will make it very difficult for any government to sell Irish Water or any other vital utility.

There is not an overnight solution to this but it would be far more reassuring if someone’s political career was pegged to the success or failure of broadband delivery — or pensions reform. We have a minister for communications but he is responsible for energy and natural resources as well, so it is hard not to think that particular cup runneth over. Broadband is an essential part of modern life and its provision to all citizens of the State needs a greater, far more urgent focus. A red light on an internet modem is not an option in 2014.