Minister hits out at opposition as broadband plan completes in Kilkenny

Minister Patrick O’Donovan also discussed plans for an under-16s social media ban

Published 22nd Jun 2026, 18:00 BST Minister Patrick O’Donovan TD marking the completion of the county’s National Broadband Plan rollout at Kilkenny Castle. Photo: David Clynch Minister Patrick O’Donovan also discussed plans for an under-16s social media ban Sign up to our Kilkenny Live newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know you can manage your profile, and explore all of the available newsletters from Kilkenny Live within your account.

Minister for Culture, Communications and Sport, Patrick O’Donovan TD, spoke about the completion of the National Broadband Plan in Kilkenny and his plans for an under-16s social media ban, with plenty of barbs thrown in to opposition parties at the Castle this week.

The Minister was in attendance at an event commemorating the historic full rollout of the massive broadband infrastructure project, with Kilkenny being the first county in the country to reach this milestone.

The National Broadband Plan, the brainchild of Fine Gael, came under huge scrutiny and criticism during its planning and inception, but Minister O’Donovan’s party held firm to see it to completion, something which he was quick to remind of when speaking to The Kilkenny People.

“It’s a great day not just for Kilkenny, but it’s a great day for the country as well because it’s the first county to be finished,” he said.

“The reality is that there was parts of rural Kilkenny and every other county in the country that were never going to get that commercial decision made that they were going to bring in high-speed, quality broadband to rural places and to be honest about it, there was a two-tier system, you had the haves and the have-nots.”

“This was vehemently opposed at the time, the media, the Dublin media, civil servants, every political party bar my own was totally opposed to it. Of course now they’ll probably all claim credit for it, it was their idea,” he added.

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The massive undertaking has been called the largest rural infrastructure project since electrification and Ardnacrusha with over €2.6 billion in state funding going towards rolling out the high-speed fibre broadband network to the over 550,000 premises included within the State Intervention Area.

Just as was the case with opposition to the current scheme, Minister O’Donovan connected this to similar consternation from the likes of Sinn Féin’s Pearse Doherty repeating itself a century later.

“It has all the characteristics of rural electrification, which is kind of symbolic because it’s the 100th anniversary of the Shannon Scheme and the damning of the Shannon at Ardnacrush outside Limerick; and at the time that was being done same people were saying it was a total waste of money ‘sure what do they need electricity for’ in rural areas,” he asserted.

“They didn’t change much, but now I suppose they’ll be taking all the credit for it,” he repeated.

“The longest serving opposition spokesperson in the world on finance was going to get rid of it too, and thankfully look, he didn’t get the opportunity to do it because counties like Kilkenny and his own county Donegal would have been left behind and that would have been a disaster.”

When asked about the challenge of integrating the new broadband with older people’s homes in Kilkenny, the Minister spoke about the move away from landlines and copper infrastructure before again bringing up initiatives from years past that all were said to be against.

“It’ll be a challenge for us next now with regard to the copper infrastructure that we’re used to for the traditional landline phone and no more than when we did the Saorview changeover for television,” he recalled.

“I remember being in the Dáil for that too and the same people who were against broadband and Ardnacrusha were against that as well. They said ‘we’ll never again be able to watch the television and Joe Duffy will be silenced’ and that it was desperate and Saoirview was going to be the end of communication, which of course was total baloney.”

“They were the same people who were against the eircode; they have a fair pattern now to be fair to them, they were against an awful lot of things. I don’t know what they’re in favour of, but anyway, we will put a plan in place,” he added.

Minister O’Donovan has recently been vocal about his determination to implement a total social media ban for under-16s, something which the Government hopes to do at an EU level, but is willing to go it alone if necessary.

The United Kingdom has introduced its own legislation on the issue and the Fianna Fáíl/Fine Gael coalition is determined to follow suit, despite concerns around efficacy and data protection.

“During Ireland’s presidency of the European Council, if we don’t get a fundamental change in this space to protect children online, and if I don’t feel that the European Union is serious about this, well then we’ll move forward ourselves unilaterally,” the Minister outlined.

“I think it would be very embarrassing to be honest if after a couple of months as the President of the Council of Ministers, that I was in a situation where I had to move my own legislation because I couldn’t get an agreement from Europe, but I’m prepared for that.”

Australia pioneered the child social media ban last year with landmark legislation, but studies have shown the restrictions to be largely ineffective with around 70% of children retaining their online accounts.

The Australian government didn’t require an ID to be verified, making the ban easier to circumvent for tech-savvy teens, which is something that an Irish or EU ban would have.

Despite numerous leaks around EU data, Minister O’Donovan was unmoved by any concerns, which he sees as a necessary risk when implementing an initiative that he believes will help keep children safe online.

“Australia decided to go down a road of age estimation as opposed to age verification, so what we would be looking at is a strong, robust system where your age would be linked to a government data set, and the government data set would be the PPS number,” he described.

“What I would say to people who might be concerned about privacy is that in a hierarchy of rights there is no right that trumps a child’s right to be protected.”

“So the protection of the child is number one and everything else is going to have to fall in behind. There will be people who oppose my plans on the basis of data protection and the rest of it,” he maintained.

Though parts of the internet may be closed off to children in Kilkenny in the near future, access to it has been expanded through the National Broadband Scheme and although the Government has come under huge pressure for infrastructure projects completing late and way over budget, this could certainly not be said about the broadband initiative.

When asked about what went so right about the project from an organisational and strategic standpoint, the Minister finished by again highlighting lack of support from opposition parties.

“Literally every single political entity opposed it. Some said that even when they got into Government that they would dismantle it and luckily, that didn’t happen, because they would have sent this country back to the Stone Age.”

“But while today is a day to be very proud of what we’ve achieved, it’s also really important that I remind people of where this country would have been had we followed the crazy policies of some of the people that just oppose everything in this country,” he concluded.

Related topics: Kilkenny National Broadband Plan Broadband Sign up to our Kilkenny Live newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know you can manage your profile, and explore all of the available newsletters from Kilkenny Live within your account.