I apologise to my colleague, Senator Murphy, for interrupting him when he was just getting into his stride. In fact, I am following one of his directives. As he said, he is interested more in things from an Irish point of view. I want not to restrict myself to an Irish problem but to a very local problem in my own home area of east Cork. As most people know, this is currently one of the fastest growing areas, if not the fastest growing and most rapidly developing area in Ireland, industrially and agriculturally. It goes without saying that the importance of good communications in that area is absolutely paramount. I am quite old enough to recall when all the telephones in the Midleton area were the wind-up type, when every call, local or otherwise, had to be made through the operator. It is regrettable that after a large expenditure of money and the opening of a new telephone exchange the situation is now worse than it was when we had the old wind-up telephones. Some years ago these telephones were replaced by dial telephones, when it was possible to dial calls within the Cork area. Since then the automatic dial facility has been extended considerably. About 18 months ago a new, very large, expensive telephone exchange was opened in the town of Midleton. This was heralded as the birth of a new age for communications in east Cork. Regrettably for the past two months this system seems to have totally broken down.
I sympathise with the problems our posts and telegraphs service faces. But in this situation I am the member of the Oireachtas most affected by this; I am the person who lives right in the centre of this area; I think the only other Deputy who would be badly affected would be Deputy Hegarty who lives about 4 miles from me in Cloyne. I am glad to have had the opportunity to raise this problem because I want to make a plea to the Minister for State on behalf of the people of east Cork, particularly of those people living in Midleton, to rectify the disastrous situation in the Midleton exchange area. It seems that the faults occurred at just about the time all the numbers were changed. The numbers in our area were changed. In fact a small sub-directory, consisting of half a dozen pages, was produced with new numbers for the Midleton area. Just about that time things went wrong.
It is now impossible to dial a call directly outside the Cork area. It is sometimes impossible to dial calls inside the Cork area. All trunk calls have to be made via the exchange. The raison d'être of an automatic exchange is to automate, to do away with the system under which calls had to go through the operator. Of course nowadays there are not enough operators to deal with a situation in which all trunk calls have to be made through the operator. This is inducing tremendous frustration generally, and the operators get frustrated. A week ago in Midleton I made my usual attempts to call Dublin by dialling 01 to no avail; there was no ringing tone from any number in Dublin that I wanted to dial. I then called the exchange and eventually got on—they are inundated with these types of calls. They asked if I had tried to dial directly. I said: “Surely you know the situation that obtains in the Midleton area; there is no possibility of dialling directly.” The operator was extremely sympathetic and said: “I know only too well. But” he said “do not do one thing, do not ring off, because I cannot call you back.” When it gets to that situation something needs to be done.
The sad thing is that the Department have spent a tremendous amount of money on a new exchange in Midleton, costing hundreds of thousands of pounds. Shortly after the opening of this exchange the telephones have gone out of action. It is not a temporary phenomenon; this has been going on for over two months; telephoning has been made almost impossible in the Midleton area. It is not good enough for the Department of Posts and Telegraphs to instal a whole range of new complicated and expensive equipment and then find it goes out of action for a period of two months. Seeing that we had a telephone capital Bill early in the life of this Parliament and the Minister talked about expenditure of the order of £350 million up to 1982 we should hope for a better situation than obtains at present. I sympathise with the problems the Department face. But the Department should spend some time sympathising with the problems that the callers in our area face. I would suggest as has been suggested before, that there are probably problems at two levels—there are the ordinary, basic problems of the equipment and the more general problems concerned with re-structuring the whole of the telephone side of the posts and telegraphs operations. I do not want to stray into that field. But, as far as equipment is concerned, the Department, in its expenditure of £350 million, should set up inside the telephone operation a research and development unit which would allow the telephone engineers access to some of the research information that is going around, and also give their research unit an opportunity of carrying out some more scientific work on the whole problem of telephonic equipment, the problem of equipment becoming obsolete, the problems which any service faces when one has to spend a lot of money, when one is faced with tremendous expenditure of knowing which is the best system to buy. The engineers who run our service would benefit greatly from this. I know, from my contacts with the engineering side of our service that they would welcome a proper research and development unit being set up inside our telephone system. I am sure there is not a proper one there at present. Some of this large expenditure of money might be put towards this, when there would be a great spin-off in the actual operations of our telephone system.
I would ask the Minister of State, when replying, not to hedge on the problems. I am sympathetic to the problems he faces. I think he should clearly and directly state the problems that have arisen in Midleton. I recall that on the last occasion on which he replied to an adjournment matter in which I was involved he did this. I welcomed it. It was a debate which concerned the slowness of the postal service between Ireland and the United Kingdom. The problem had something to do with tomatoes and an airline contract which had gone wrong. The Minister was quite straightforward on that occasion. I should like him to be straightforward, not to hedge on the problems because in the long run neither he nor his Department will get any sympathy from irate consumers if they do not let the people know what is actually going wrong.
It is rather sad that an attempt has not been made to make the people in my area aware of what the problems really are rather than compelling me to raise the matter here. The Department should have not just apologised to the users of the telephone service in The Cork Examiner but should have put out a clear, distinct and direct statement explaining what the problems are, giving some indication of when these problems would be tackled, and then the users would have some sympathy with them. I should like the Minister of State to do everything in his power not only to outline what are the problems in the Midleton exchange area but to have them rectified at the very first opportunity.
