In recent years streets and roads in urban areas, particularly those in the greater Dublin area, have been continually wrecked and devastated by telecom operators, with subcontractors behaving like cowboys in an old gold rush film with repeated excavation. In one case a telecom company secretly excavated the excavation of another company in order to install an extra channel. The road network in the four county council areas, particularly in the north and west sides, has been devastated. For example, Dame Street has been excavated approximately 100 times over the past 20 months, while East Wall Road has been excavated 38 times and Beaumont Road in my constituency no less than 60 times in the past year. The same applies to an entire network of roads, including Kilmore Road, Tonlegee Road and Baldoyle Road.
On the Minister's instructions, local authorities have installed new bus lanes, cycle routes etc. on many roads in Dublin. However, within a few months of the installation of the new bus lane on the Malahide Road telecom cowboys destroyed it. There are similar examples throughout the north of the city. Local authorities do not receive a penny for these excavations, which are very dangerous. Last week in my constituency a 75 year old woman stumbled over an excavation, while I had the horrible experience of falling over a flagstone in Lower Exchange Street while rushing to a Dublin City Council meeting.
The Government is responsible for this chaos. There are 72 licensed operators claiming the right to excavate the streets, 11 of which are currently laying facilities on streets on the north side. For example, NTL is installing massive infrastructure to link up with the broadband network in Clonshaugh, while Esat, which is now British Telecom, Cable & Wireless, Worldcom, the City of London Telecom's COLT, are pulling streets and roads apart. All these companies claim the right to excavate. Local authorities do not receive a penny for these excavations which cause disturbance to pedestrians, cyclists and drivers and massive long-term damage to roads. In cases where excavations should be completed roads and streets are beginning to subside and holes are starting to appear.
Some months ago during the debate on the planning legislation, Deputy Gilmore identified the reason for the problem, that is, this area is governed by obsolete legislation, the Telegraph Act, 1863. When deregulation was introduced in 1996 and 1997 we should have had a major overhaul of this area, including the recasting of the Act or the introduction of new planning legislation to regulate the 71 companies which claim the absolute right to excavate streets and roads. The Minister for the Environment and Local Government, Deputy Dempsey, and the Minister for Public Enterprise, Deputy O'Rourke, are proposing a new infrastructure Bill which apparently will attempt to grapple with the key issue of property rights in subterranean areas and public spaces. We need a new telecom Bill to regulate the behaviour of these people and the amount of money they should pay for disrupting public space.
The core issue is that a valuable national resource, public streets and roads, are being seized and devastated by cowboy operators with impunity, and there has been no response to the problem by the Government to date. Local authorities are currently negotiating with the Association of Licensed Telecom Operators to put forward some solution but so far the Dublin City Manager, John Fitzgerald, the Fingal County Manager, Willie Soffe, and the road engineers in the two counties I represent have not received a response from the Government to repeated requests for legislation. Alternatively it could, as suggested by Deputy Gilmore, recast the planning legislation in such a way that there is control. We are totally exacerbated with the failure of the Government to regulate these utilities and introduce a proper legal structure against which they can operate.
