Since Storm Éowyn on 24 January last, a huge number of people living in rural parts of my constituency and in the north west have no access to broadband or to landline and mobile phone networks. There seems to be absolutely no urgency on the part of the providers to rectify matters.

There are elderly people living on their own who have emergency contact buttons that do not work. They cannot contact friends, neighbours or relations. The Minister for communications needs to intervene with these service providers to get them to fulfil their obligations to people and to restore the services people need in order to call in outside assistance from entities such as ESB Networks. This should be done without delay.

I agree with the Deputy. Every effort is being made by the various State agencies to restore services. I have met with most of them - Uisce Éireann, ESB Networks, EirGrid and so on - in the context of getting power restored as quickly as possible and also in terms of the restoration of communications networks. More than that, we need to invest in areas in terms of the social and human networks that were so indispensable to people during this storm. Much of the investment in sporting facilities and local community groups has proved very effective. Many of those facilities were used by communities during Storm Éowyn. Therefore, we think we can support them more. There will be a targeted approach to institutionalising that social network resource we have a bit more.