Mattie McGrath decries telecom failures and neglected broadband

When I go to Las Cancola, I do welcome this piece of legislation, this bill, and indeed, as the previous speaker mentioned, certainly the whole area of Cranmerich and the different aspects to this area that people are really struggling with. And it's a sad indictment, really, in our country, that when we meet people in our clinics, when people come to my office, and I'm going to thank the girls, my office, ladies, come in, especially, I can mention many, but air is a disaster completely. And people out in rural areas, very rural, isolated areas, who are dependent, who are depending on, for safety and security, on a pendent alarm. And their airline might be down for a month, two months, three months, sometimes six months, and cannot get through, and can navigate the system, elderly people especially. And I walked in one day, and I had my daughter saying, please don't pass me to somebody else. There was a woman sitting in front of her, for an hour and a quarter, onto a company, and they had to be there to identify themselves, in case of GDPR. But you'll pass from Vinnie to Jack, to Nate, to Tom, to Mary, to Billy, and back around the house again, and you'll get no resolution. And I think it's so frustrating. I recently met a nurse in a hospital in Dublin, and I hadn't seen her, for the last couple of years, I hadn't seen her before. Oh, she said, I've just moved back from England, from the UK. I used to be over every year, she said, to visit my mother over on holidays, but I never realised that things were so bad with utility companies, until I came back, with her family, the kids, four kids, which is great, bought a house, and tried to navigate with the utility companies. She said, it was a nightmare compared to what it is in the UK. So what is wrong with us here, in our supposedly modern and inclusive state, when we're excluding people, we're discriminating against people, especially people that are not, and I wondered it myself, that I'm not good at IT, and it's probably the age, but I know, I do. I remember when I was chaired at the Education Board, I often gave services to 90-year-olds, who went back, and they don't leave services, or anything else. And it's wonderful to see it, but many, many people, and proficient with electronic gadgets, but especially, as I said, older people, they're not into them. They barely turn on RT1 television and off, and it's, you know, the remotes and all, and it's scandalous that they're not looked after, and they're neglected and abandoned by these companies, and paying dearly for the pleasure of being neglected and abandoned. And it's very, very, very, very, very, very serious, and we seem to just pass it off. We have comrade, I guess, we have a plethora of regulators now, but I, honest to God, I wonder sometimes, what is their function, because they don't seem to be able, or suffer from inertia, or whatever, dealing with these companies, they can't seem to be able to get companies to behave properly. And it's all, it is good, because I'm in business, or a part of the business, and it's, thank God, celebrating 40 years this year, and I want to thank my wife and my son for carrying on when I'm in this present job. But we wouldn't have any customer if we behaved the way they behaved. We'd have no customer. It's just, customer service, it doesn't need to apply to them. And I'm not blaming the people at the other end of the phone, often they're, often it's farmed out to, to, to, um, different companies and call centres and all the rest of it. And it's just so sad, so sad that people have to be so forced to come to us, as politicians, um, go to the Ombudsman, go to the likes of Joe Duffy, or, uh, indeed, the radio show talks, you hear it all the time. Just totally not a frustration, people, of being abandoned by, uh, with services that they paid for. They're already paid in their taxes, it's about many of these, you know, set up a rollout of, of, of, of, of air and local broadband. I mean, I have people that are a hundred and a hundred meters and maybe a little longer from, uh, from, uh, from a, uh, from a centre where it has broadband and they can't get it. And they're thought it'll be two, three years. It's shameful in this modern era. When I think of being at Alphina Fonardish, which I was when the late Albert Winners held up a phone, the old big phone that we used to have in the hall stand in the house when we got it first, and you were, and you were afraid to go near it as kids. It was polished twice a week, but you didn't, you, you didn't, um, you wouldn't allow it to touch it, because you, when you would dial, you, you got onto the post office, uh, local post office, and they had to put you on. But anyway, he held it up, he said, I'll have a phone in everyone's house with a munch. And he succeeded. And that was 1978 or nine. He succeeded. And now, um, now people will be waiting, infinitely waiting for, indefinitely, for a phone line, for ESB, to be fair to them are really good, uh, they're very good customer service, and they're very good at repairs, so there's outages, and they're good in all kinds of weathers, but as the other companies, I mean, and, and then some come and some go, but, um, the broadband situation is just, uh, and we have, we have, um, um, we have timescales given for rollout, and none of them are met, and it's supposed to be fined, and, and paying huge fines, but, uh, I don't know who's fined them, or where's the, how the pain defines our, it's public money that, uh, there's funding the rollout for broadband scheme, so, is that public paying, paying the fines as well, contributing to pay the fines, as well as waiting for the, for the broadband, and I think it's just appalling, quite simply appalling, it's a sad statistic in our, in a modern country, when we see the young people with all the smartphones and everything else, but when you, when ordinary people can't get services that they were used to having, and the great people that worked in some of those, uh, service providers, and Aircom, and, and, and then Aircom, and the gangs of men, now, uh, someone could come from, it's to my area, it's on Meloch here, they could come, they could come from Mayo, to repair a, a little depth distance, to repair an outage, or a cable, or whatever, and, to see, then all the poles rotting, falling in the ditches, wires hanging down on top of the ditches, farmers can't cut their fences, get tangled up machines, they're dangerous, and it's a scandalous to have a public, uh, of course a public utility, uh, to have no pride in their work, and have no, the moral, moral must be very low as well, but there's no staff left, and I, I had one of them here with me, uh, yesterday, part of your colleague, and his wife, Julie, who walks with me over here, visited me on Tuesday, and he, but dedicated, uh, Aircom, and Air employee for all his life, and, um, um, um, you know, it's a pity, uh, with the service they gave, and many more like them, and now we can't, so I hope this legislation isn't just sticking in a box, and it isn't just, um, uh, it isn't just, um, um, you know, passing another piece of legislation here if we have no proper regulators, uh, to, with proper teeth, uh, to regulate it, because it's so frustrating. As I said, I want to be repetitive for people to be paying for a service, and be punished without a service, and then, and then, um, the frustration of trying to deal, and wait, and wait, and deal, and get fobbed off, literally. So, I, I, I hope the legislation will, will, will make some impact here, but I very much doubt it. Goedemiddag.