I made a comment on a TV show in recent weeks that seems to have struck a cord with quite a few people.

I said that while talking to four 14 years olds whom I was bringing to a football match in Sligo, I discovered that only one of the four had Broadband access at home. I made the point that if I had been living in Poland, and bringing four 14 year olds to a football match there, all four of them would have had Broadband at home.

The absence of Broadband availability in rural Ireland is of deep concern to me. The view seems to exist that Broadband is only something that businesses need be concerned about, and because these generally locate in urban areas, Broadband is not an issue.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Every one of us now lives in a global economy, where jobs and capital can be moved around like pieces on a Monopoly board. In 20 years time, there will be no such thing as national economies; every service and every product will be traded globally, in real time, where distances of thousands of miles are reduced to flickers on a computer screen.

In that type of economic environment, knowledge is everything. Investment will be attracted not by tax rates or grant aid, but by the ability of workforces to deliver high levels of productivity.

This is the world into which we are sending our children, a world in which the only currency of any value is knowledge.

Broadband delivers knowledge into our homes in the same way that underground pipes deliver water. If we are not providing our children with the same access to knowledge as children in other countries, we are undermining their ability to be productive, and they will suffer for it.

Broadband is not a luxury; it is an economic and social necessity. Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats didn’t realise this when they sold Eircom (with Fine Gael’s support), and they don’t realise it now.

I want to see the State make whatever investment is necessary to ensure that every house in rural Ireland has access to affordable Broadband, even it no one is going to make a profit from delivering it. That’s a non-negotiable as far as I am concerned, and I won’t entertain any other proposal. This is just too important.