Violet-Anne Wynne (Clare, Independent) | Oireachtas source

It is just over a year since I first condemned in this House the Minister's proposal to convert a light industrial building in Shannon into emergency accommodation for IPAS. I gave my reasons then, and consistently since, for opposing the proposal. I liaised with the Department on behalf of Shannon Chamber to meet the Minister about this. My team followed up with 15 emails and made 22 telephone calls that went ignored by the Department until a meeting was eventually promised in late August. Then, last week when seeking an update, we were told that the Department had scrapped the plan. It is a full year later, with God knows how much money wasted on a plan that I, constituency colleagues and the local community told the Minister would not work. Instead, however, it was insisted that you guys knew better and now you have been proven wrong.

Not only that but in that full year in which this plan was being worked on, not one extra doctor, public health nurse, garda or dentist was planned for my constituency. The engagement with public representatives has been woefully inadequate. The engagement with communities has been non-existent. The Minister's community engagement team was not even set up until nearly two years into the current crisis. The Government and its predecessors have stripped my constituency of essential public services and have given not one flute about us. Then, without advance notice, it inflated our population in a way that we could not sustainably plan for. Not only that but the Government pushed the already stretched resources in many rural communities to breaking point and beyond. Consider the fact that County Clare is part of the only region with a model 4 hospital - a teaching hospital nonetheless - that is not supported with a model 3 hospital.

The information vacuum was created by this Government and the rise of whatever label you choose which the Minister and his colleagues bemoan in this House was created in that vacuum. The Minister and the Taoiseach allowed this to happen. From the outside looking in, it looks like the Government is in the space of reactionary politics from which nobody benefits. What we have needed, however, is politics that responds. This is not the fault of anybody who came to this country looking for protection. It is not the fault of rural people who are at breaking point. It is the fault of this Government and its consistent attack on rural communities in starving us of essential services.

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