The Office of Public Works (OPW) has said it will discontinue its contracts with Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite service once an alternative from an Irish company is available.
The OPW is one of a number of State agencies that relies on the controversial former Donald Trump ally’s satellite internet services company. An Garda Síochána, the Prison Service and the Revenue Commissioners also currently have Starlink contracts.
Starlink, which is owned by SpaceX, is a powerful broadband internet system based on a constellation of thousands of low-orbit satellites. It offers internet services to more than six million people across 140 countries.
The OPW contracts Starlink to bring internet and phone data coverage to two historic sites in remote parts of the country with poor connectivity.
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The first is Tintern Abbey, a Cistercian monastery in partial ruins on the Hook peninsula in Co Wexford. The second is Annes Grove, an estate near Castletownroche in Co Cork. The OPW started using Starlink last June.
The OPW said it signed up to Starlink for “remote sites where we were unable to acquire a suitable broadband service locally or through existing procurement frameworks”.
“These satellite services are procured on a month-to-month basis and are likely to be discontinued once terrestrial alternatives become available in the future,” it said.
The Office of the Revenue Commissioners also uses Starlink for maritime satellite internet communication units on each of its three anti-smuggling patrol vessels.
These vessels, called cutters, need internet services for their analytics and detection technologies.
Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe said the three Revenue cutters are “utilising services provided by Starlink”, which were “procured in line with public procurement procedures”.
Mr Donohoe was responding to a series of parliamentary questions from Fine Gael TD for Longford-Westmeath Micheál Carrigy. Mr Carrigy asked a number of Ministers if their departments or any agencies under their aegis had contracts with Starlink.
Revenue said it had spent €93,237 on Starlink since 2023, and the SpaceX-owned service is “widely used as a cost-effective marine data provider across the marine industry internationally”. It said it has “no issues or concerns” regarding the current services provided by Starlink.
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Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan said both An Garda Síochána and the Irish Prison Service “have procured Starlink satellite services to support their telecommunications requirements”. A spokesman for the prison service said it “does not comment on operational or security matters”.
On Thursday, Mr Musk was forced to apologise after Starlink suffered a major international outage that knocked tens of thousands of users offline.
On X, the social media platform which he also owns, Mr Musk wrote: “Sorry for the outage. SpaceX will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”
The rare disruption, which affected Starlink users across the US and Europe, was blamed on an internal software failure.
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