52 February-March 2026

February-March 2026 PB

By Michael Smith

Overboard band

Ireland now has rural ﬁbre but the NBP

remains a monument to bad planning,

political avoidance and a settlement

pattern that makes every infrastructure

project cost more than it should

he National Broadband Plan (NBP)

has entered its self-congratulatory

phase. 150,000 homes have now

been served and 146,000 kilometres

of ﬁbre laid. The Government now

cites the 2025 independent EY evaluation as

evidence that the project is delivering real

economic value: increased rural employment,

improved enterprise productivity, greater

remote-work capacity, better quality of life

and, critically, new competition among retail

broadband providers in areas long left behind.

EY’s broadly positive assessment is correct.

Rural ﬁbre has transformative eects.

But politicians and commentators have

seized on that validation to retroﬁt the NBP

as a policy masterstroke. Adrian Weckler’s

late-2025 celebration in the Irish Independent,

greeted with rejoicing on X by the likes of Leo

Varadkar, is the most accessible version of this

narrative — the NBP as a rare megaproject “on

time, on budget and quietly transformative”.

That version is tidy, appealing and politically

useful. It is also historically and politically

inaccurate.

The EY report is valuable precisely because

it does not attempt to retell the project’s origin

story. Its job is to evaluate outcomes, not to

cleanse the record. And when read honestly,

the report highlights something obvious that

the triumphalists glide past: the beneﬁts of

the NBP are what ﬁbre delivers anywhere it is

built. They do not prove that the way Ireland

procured, structured and justiﬁed the project

was sensible. They simply demonstrate that

high-quality broadband is good for people.

The decisive factor — still barely

acknowledged in mainstream commentary

— is Ireland’s extreme pattern of dispersed

housing. For decades some of us have argued

that the true infrastructure crisis in Ireland is

not technological or ﬁnancial but spatial. The

country is a lattice of one-o houses scattered

across drumlins, valleys and rural roads,

generated by decades of permissive planning

and political parish-pull. Fibre to dense villages

is cheap. Fibre to isolated homes kilometres

from any cluster is not.

The NBP did not become expensive because

ﬁbre is expensive. It became expensive

because Ireland’s settlement pattern makes

all infrastructure expensive.

The State will subsidise ﬁbre to roughly

564,000 premises in the “Intervention Area”;

that area exists because no commercial

operator could justify the cost. The ocial

average subsidy per premises is around

€5,200, but that is an averaging trick. In

reality, remote homes routinely cost €10,000–

€15,000 to serve. Long driveways, trenching,

ducting gaps and road-crossings — all of it

driven by low density — inﬂate costs. EY’s

analysis implicitly recognises this, noting the

“signiﬁcant civil works” burden in rural areas

and the ﬁgures above suggest each home

is compelling about a kilometre of ﬁbre. But

the political system refuses to face the causal

chain.

Ireland chose its geography. The NBP simply

inherited it.

The second buried truth is that the NBP was

launched through a procurement collapse. By

2018 every credible bidder except one had

withdrawn. The State ended up negotiating

the largest infrastructure subsidy in its

history with a single remaining consortium.

Standard procurement logic would require a

restart. Instead, ministers — Denis Naughten

ﬁrst, then Richard Bruton — pushed ahead.

Naughten’s dinner-table diplomacy with the

bidder during tendering was more than a lapse

of judgment; it fatally undermined the process.

The Department of Public Expenditure warned

repeatedly that a single-bidder negotiation

removed any leverage over cost or design.

Those warnings were ignored.

EY’s report is silent on this, because it isn’t

its job to address it, independent and all as it

is. But it is part of the NBP’s DNA.

Nor were the early critics, led by civil servant

Robert Watt, wrong when they warned that

commercial operators would continue building

ﬁbre during the NBP’s delays, eliminating

some of the very “market failure” the plan was

designed to resolve. In multiple regions that

is exactly what happened. The NBP was not

moving quickly; Eir was.

And Ireland also refused to consider

technological hybrids. Starlink now delivers

100–200 Mbps to the most remote homes

at low latency and without excavators. A

mixed model — ﬁbre to clusters, wireless or

5G regionally, satellite for the most dispersed

— could have achieved universal coverage

far earlier and cheaper. But hybrid models

were treated as politically toxic. Fibre to every

cottage was an article of faith.

The NBP is not proof that the Irish system

works. It is proof that even a dysfunctional

system occasionally stumbles into a

good outcome — at a price higher than

necessary,under conditions we should not

repeat and despite expensive “independent”

laudatory reports.

The truth is not that the NBP was an

example of brave policymaking triumphing

over cynicism. The truth is that the State

backed itself into a corner through decades

of permissive planning, allowed a competitive

tender to collapse, and pressed ahead with

a single-bidder megaproject because retreat

would have been politically humiliating. The

NBP is not a story of visionary success. It is

a story of a ﬂawed process that eventually

produced a good outcome at a higher cost

than necessary — and a country, and its media,

still unwilling to admit that its infrastructure

problems begin with the way it chooses to live

on the land.

OPINION

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