Communications Regulation (Amendment) Bill 2007 - 20th February 2007

Communications Regulation (Amendment) Bill 2007 - Committee Stage - 20th February 2007
Mr. Norris: I move amendment No. 25:
In page 44, before Schedule 1, to insert the following new section:
33.—That the Government shall make provision analogous to that under which house owners were facilitated in buying out ground rents to allow telephone subscribers to buy out the telephone line to their address.”.
I made a mistake. The amendment ruled out of order related to people recording one’s telephone calls without one’s permission, which is a disgrace. I will communicate with the Minister about it. It is outrageous that when one telephones a State agency, the gas company or the like, one is told one’s telephone call may be recorded for training purposes. They are not paying me for training anybody. I am not prepared to train them. It is a private telephone call. I will ask the Minister to examine this practice. The Cathaoirleach is quite correct that it is not directly relevant to the Bill.
Amendment No. 25 is. I thought the Cathaoirleach had ruled it out of order and I am glad he has not. As the Minister knows, Eircom is a disaster. It has behaved extremely badly. The flotation was a mess, then Mr. O’Reilly got in, took what he wanted and flogged it to an Australian pension fund. The Irish taxpayer installed those lines but they will pay for them forever. That is absurd. This Government, as a republican government, quite correctly abolished ground rents and gave Irish citizens the right to buy themselves out of the abusive position whereby landlords, in perpetuity, claimed the right to bleed people for ground rent every year and provided no service whatever.
The Irish taxpayer has provided the telephone lines. Most of the time the lines are defective. In my home I can usually tell what the weather outside is by picking up the telephone. If it is not working, it is probably raining. The lines have out of date connections that were put in by the Irish Government. There should be a once-off payment or people should be empowered to buy their own lines and accept responsibility for them.
This mad notion of dismantling all the State services and utilities, privatising them and making a god out of competition is to the disadvantage of the ordinary citizen. The craze about competition does not achieve what was intended. As a result, one cannot get the telephone company to repair a telephone line. It accepts no responsibility. It will recommend a franchised service, and one gets different people all the time. Each of them will give different excuses, such as, “I would not have done it that way” or “That is not the correct way to do it” or “We are waiting for a part”. It is the usual absolute rubbish. One does not get proper service, the lines are often faulty, it takes ages to get repair people to call and there are no proper telephone line repair people. The service is franchised and one does not know with whom one is dealing and those people do not accept ultimate responsibility. They bounce back the problem to the customer.
If one tries to get something done with the wiring that was originally installed by the then Department of Posts and Telegraphs, the company will not even send a person to deal with the problem. One must find somebody in the Golden Pages to do it. If the Government believes in privatisation, let it privatise the lines. Allow ordinary people to buy their own telephone lines in order that they will not be required to pay for them in perpetuity. Let us say the rent for the line is €20 per month. That amounts to €240 per year, in perpetuity, for people doing nothing to lines they did not install in the first place. They simply bought them as an investment.
I urge the Minister to act on his good republican instincts and allow Irish people to end this absurdity. Let us pay for the services we get and not be subservient to the multinational corporations as we were once subservient to the imperial ruling class.
Mr. N. Dempsey: I must disappoint the Senator and not accept the amendment.
Mr. Norris: Will the Minister examine the issue?
Mr. N. Dempsey: I will certainly examine it. The selling of telephone connections to home owners is entirely a commercial matter for the telephone company, in this case Eircom. It is a privately owned company in a fully liberalised market. A Minister has no function in that area. The only question that arises is, given what the Senator said about the existing poor service, what if people buy the lines from Eircom and own them? What does he believe that would do to the service in terms of repair?

Mr. N. Dempsey: There is a slight difference between ground rents and what we are talking about now. We got paid approximately €8 billion for the piece of infrastructure we had in the ground. The people who have it bought it from us. If I recall rightly, in the early 1970s, when the then Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, Deputy Albert Reynolds, announced that the system would be digitised and the network put in, it cost approximately €2 billion. We got a reasonably good return on it in the meantime. There is a difference. It is private property now. It has been owned, bought and paid for——
Mr. Norris: So were the ground rents.
Mr. N. Dempsey: ——by the company. We should not get too hung up on this because a number of new technologies now allow for telephone service to be delivered without wires, and that is the route it will go in the future. On the other hand, and the Senator might be here giving out to me ten years from now, I am sure——
Mr. Norris: The Minister is very optimistic. I sincerely hope I will be here.
Mr. N. Dempsey: It is my nature to be optimistic. I am sure Eircom will be delighted to begin taking the purchase price off people for wires again. It would suit Babcock & Brown, and the pension funds it fronts, to get a big lump of money back into its coffers. I do not think I will oblige it.
Mr. Norris: I do not accept everything the Minister said but I will put up with it. The +
Mr. N. Dempsey: It was——
Mr. Norris: There was not any particular discretionary payment of X amount for the lines, and I do not believe it was €8 billion. I would like to leave the matter open and ask the Minister to examine it because as a recurring charge one is never finished with it. The Government may have done well in getting €8 billion but the taxpayer, the individual telephone subscriber, did not. I will leave it at that.
An Cathaoirleach: Is the Senator withdrawing the amendment?
Mr. Norris: I will withdraw it but I will be pestiferous on Report Stage.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
SCHEDULE 1.
Mr. McCarthy: I move amendment No. 26:+++
Mr. N. Dempsey: I have sympathy for the intent of the Senator’s amendment but I cannot ++
Mr. Finucane: I presume the Minister’s reference to telephone embraces mobile +
Mr. N. Dempsey: Yes.
Mr. McCarthy: I understand the Minister’s point but the issue of cyber bulling is of +
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Schedule 1 agreed to.