Mr. Chris Byrne:

I am one of these fools who has been 20 years a volunteer without any salary or pay. I have been self-employed for all of those 20 years. What I have done has come out of my and my family's pocket. I am based in a rural community. We have three businesses operating from a 30-acre plot of land and are ten miles from the nearest town. Accordingly, I am well acquainted with the challenges of rural development. One might think I am from Kerry, west Cork or somewhere else when in fact I am an hour from Dublin.

Before the recession, our company had 64 employees. We now have eight. The devastation of that in our locality, our parish and community is huge. What does an employer in a rural area suffer as a consequence of being isolated? In any of the rural development programmes put forward, there has never been an initiative that has focused on rural microenterprise or the entrepreneur setting up in a rural area. The value of family businesses in a rural community is being understated completely. The loss of that value is going to fall out. I have ten grandchildren, ranging in ages from one to 13. I doubt whether any of them will be employed in any rural capacity in any rural town in 30 years from now. This is because we have failed to address the longer-term connectivity of policies. Everything is based on one programme and the rules around it. There is no joined-up thinking between different programmes. I have been chairman of a rural development company for 12 years, so I have a good understanding of the rules and how they operate. The fact that there is not any joined-up thinking between the different programmes is a significant failure.

There has never been any tax concession to rural employers. Concessions are given to inner city or financial centre employers. If I have to go to get a bag of nails at my local hardware store, it will cost €4. The time and the travel is a 12-mile round trip. My competitors based in a peri-urban area can walk into a village and get a bag of nails. Do I move my business to there or do I find some mechanism for operating in a rural community?

There is no easy way to access finance for small businesses, particularly in rural areas. I know initiatives were put in place before. However, if we are looking at how we are going to sustain a rural economy, we have to address those issues. The banking sector has failed miserably to address this. Rural development is in decline because a way of life in the countryside is in decline. Our structures are geared towards urban centres and centralising control and power.

At the risk of using locker-room conversation-----