Cliff Taylor: Ballybrophy needs broadband not railway lines

Fair play to TD Alan Kelly. Faced with figures showing the Limerick to Ballybrophy rail line was subsidised to the tune of €550 per passenger, he said in media interviews – without missing a beat – that the problem was that the line needed more investment to attract more people. It was like saying a small, sparsely-used back road would attract more traffic if it was turned into a motorway.

It would be cheaper for the State to pay for taxis for the 73 daily passengers. The official online taxi charge calculator shows that it would cost at most €400 for a trip of 250 kilometres, which would more than cover any possible travel requirements. And most of the journeys would be way shorter.

Defending local services is, of course, part of what we expect from local representatives. Whether it be the post office, the local emergency department or the Garda station, the TD will be out with the protestors. Sometimes they have a case; sometimes it is just politics.

But there is another much bigger development under way, which rural TDs should really be focusing on. Forget the railway lines – the broadband lines are what could really deliver for rural Ireland. More than 35 per cent of the population – some 927,000 households and businesses with 1.8 million people – do not currently have a decent broadband service. They are the targets of the National Broadband Plan, a state-backed initiative to deliver a minimum level of service.

Moving slowly

But it is all moving slowly. The plan was first announced by then minister Pat Rabbitte back in 2012, but the financial crisis put it on hold. Then his successor, Alex White, promised to have contracts agreed by the middle of 2016. But again it was put off, and now we are told that contracts should be signed by the middle of next year. The plan will then take some five years to deliver in full, though significant numbers could see improved connections more quickly, we are told.

The Department of Communications is currently going through tenders for the plan and liaising with the three shortlisted bidders. In terms of long-term investment it is the most important thing this government will set in train. But the signs are that it could yet take more time than anticipated to get the whole process going.

And then there is the real worry about actually delivering it, in a country where we are not good at the co-ordination required for major investments, and a legal challenge can hold up infrastructure projects. Look at the expansions to the national electricity grid, for example.

Minister for Communications Denis Naughten has underlined the Government’s commitment to the plan and there is a large team of public servants working on a very detailed process with the three bidders, Eir, Enet and Siro – the latter a joint venture between Vodafone and the ESB.

It appears that fear of legal action from a losing bidder means the process is moving ever so slowly. The controversy over the second mobile phone licence remains in the official mind. The June 2017 deadline to sign contracts with the winner, or winners, could well be threatened, as i’s are dotted and t’s crossed, with lawyers on all sides vetting every half step forward.

Legal challenge

And just as the legal process holds up the negotiations, the snail’s pace of legal, planning and administrative issues which dog every major Irish project could threaten the roll-out. Getting it done will require an unprecedented level of cooperation between the winning bidders, the departments of communications and rural affairs, the National Roads Authority and local authorities. And in our increasingly litigious country, there is a risk of multiple legal challenge to parts of the development.

The departments involved are working to try to clear the way for the planning process and engagement with local concerns. They are promising local action groups to try to speed planning and assist local authorities in getting it all started. If ever there was an area for local public representatives to get stuck into it is this.

A few years ago we were talking about the “digital economy”. But the whole economy is now digital. And we still have business people driving around with dongles trying to find a signal for their laptops, or whole areas of rural Ireland where setting up a business is simply not possible due to the lack of a proper service. A Vodafone survey this week showed not far off half of rural businesses where dissatisfied with their broadband speed – and more than one third would consider relocating to an area of better service.

Service obligation

The commitment is to deliver a 30-megabits-per-second (Mbps) service to all households – a kind of universal service obligation similar to that existing for domestic phone lines. A survey published this week by comparison website Switcher.ie showed that we are a long way away from this. Over one-third of the tests showed download speeds of less than 5 Mbps and services in the worst regions were up to 36 times slower than in Dublin.

The figures suggest that even some areas which do pay for broadband are getting a poor service. The number of households which will be covered by the National Broadband Plan was recently increased by 170,000 to 927,000 – and the problem could be even bigger.

Broadband is now essential – for people running SMEs, for attracting foreign direct investment and creating jobs. And it is essential just for living, with key services such as healthcare increasingly delivered online. This is the future. A railway carrying 73 people a day is, unfortunately, the past.