asked the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs if in view of the deterioration in telephone communications with Britain and the consequent disruption and serious loss caused to Irish business and the inconvenience to the general public, he will, as a matter of urgency, take the necessary measures to rectify this problem and if he will make a statement on the matter.
Private Notice Questions. - Telephone Communications with Britain.
I should like, first of all, to express my regret to the public for the inconvenience resulting from inability to make telephone calls to certain parts of Britain requiring the assistance of an operator in Dublin.
I should explain that there has been a shortage of circuits from this country to Britain for some time. The capacity to provide all the extra circuits needed will be available following the opening of a new trunk exchange in Dublin and the provision of a new microwave link to Britain later this year.
Changes were made recently by the British Post Office in the routing through their network of calls made by telephone operating staff in this country to numbers of destinations in Britain. As a result of these rearrangements, a substantial proportion of manually-operated telephone calls to Britain are now routed through new exchanges in Manchester and Bristol and circuits available on these routes are inadequate to carry traffic.
The total number of circuits available to Britain at present is being redistributed to provide more of them on the Manchester and Bristol routes. Some of these will be available today and more tomorrow. The bulk of the work involved in allocating more circuits to these routes has to be done by the British Post Office. The British Post Office have been pressed to carry out the work involved as a matter of top priority, and I am assured that it is being treated by them on this basis. They are also examining urgently whether interim relief measures suggested to them can be implemented.
I can assure Deputies that I am taking every action open to me to improve the position to the maximum extent, as quickly as that can be done, and I would appeal to the operators, whose frustration in this matter I can fully appreciate, to resume immediately the handling of this traffic. I would also appeal to the public to have some understanding of the operators' problems in this regard. I should add that subscriber dialled trunk calls to Britain and calls via the operator to Britain routed through Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Chester, London and Liverpool exchanges are not affected. Calls from this country to Britain from centres outside Dublin can continue to be made.
When may we expect the service to return to normality or very near normality? Will the Minister comment on the report in the papers this morning that the dispute has escalated and that some 14,000 calls were affected yesterday?
In my reply the Deputy will have noted that the bulk of the work to restore the full routing to Britain has to be carried out by the British Post Office. We have suggested to the British Post Office interim measures to alleviate the situation. These are, to restore the routes to Britain through the London-Kingsway route which was available before the changeover and also that some of the traffic which used to be routed through Chester to the various parts of England and which was transferred to Manchester exchange recently should be restored in the interim to the Chester route where we have adequate circuits.
How soon does the Minister expect that to happen?
We were in constant touch with the British Post Office every two hours yesterday and today. As I get information I will relay it to the Deputy.
Is there an escalation of the dispute as reported in the papers?
I am not aware of any escalation in the dispute. The Minister of State had consultations with the members of the executive of the union yesterday evening and this morning. There will be a union meeting in the Central Telephone Exchange hopefully tonight or tomorrow morning. We are not aware of any escalation whatsoever in the dispute.