Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister. I appreciate that the Minister and the two Ministers of State, Deputies Michael Ring and Seán Kyne, live in rural areas, but I think this debate is unrealistic. The action plan is not an action plan. The system got the better of it. It took everything it was doing already and put it into the plan because there was nothing new to be said. The €60 million, which we are not even sure about, is very little money in the context of rural Ireland. The reality is the system lives with the status quo.

We have to face a second reality. In many ways rural Ireland is very unfairly treated and has been for many years. I think, in the heart and soul, the Minister and Ministers of State know this. I am not saying it happened suddenly under this Government but nothing will be done to address it unless we face facts. In many ways we pay taxes for services we do not get. There is a big debate about water and sewage. If free water and sewage is given to cities it will be the case that we have been paying in, but we will not be getting anything out of it.

When we check on the Bus Éireann subsidies, one would think the subsidy per head of population in the really rural parts of Ireland, when we take out the cities of Galway Limerick and Cork, would be very high. I understand it could be as little as a tenth per head. In other words €10 is paid in Dublin for every €1 paid for public transport in rural areas. This idea that rural areas are a drain on resources is often totally untrue. In rural Ireland it tends to actually be a case of Muhammad going to the mountain rather than the mountain going to Muhammad.

What do we actually give rural houses? We give them a road but let us be honest about it, since we already have a dispersed population the roads will have to be put in unless rural Ireland is denuded of its population. We give them water. Water is very cheap to provide. It can be done for approximately €6,000 a house. Even in the most isolated areas it would be approximately €8,000. We could not provide sewage at that cost. We will give a one-off subsidy, that would not build a bypass, for getting fibre broadband to every house.

What do we not give that we give in urban areas? We provide capital and current for sewage all the time. We provide capital and current for street lights all the time. We provide capital and current for pavements all the time. We continuously do street cleaning in cities and we do not in rural areas. There are also things like public parks and so on. The first thing that we all should agree, as rural people, is that rural Ireland pays taxes on the same basis as everybody else but it does not get the services. There is this idea that it is expensive to service rural Ireland.

The second thing that worries me is a narrative there has been in Government that Ireland's future is about towns and villages. I have fought against it and I was instrumental in blocking one Government who tried to refresh the spacial strategy to eliminate people living in the countryside. I rewrote the previous one before that in huge detail. I will claim to have been the guy with the hand up to stop this twice when I was in Government. This concept that rural Ireland's future is about towns and villages seems to be in all the speeches given today. It keeps coming up and they keep putting it in.

I know how these things are generated. The system keeps generating them. It keeps referring to towns and villages, people living in our towns and villages and so on. With the Internet, that is a nineteenth and twentieth century concept. With the Internet, people do not go to their local town to go to the bank. They go to their mobile phone. With the internet, if people want to book something or even if they want to buy clothes, most people now do it on the phone, on the iPad or on the laptop. The private companies, by the way, do not seem to have any problem delivering to anywhere and everywhere, even up the mountain. The reality is that anywhere someone wants it they will get it.

The idea that we all have to conglomerate is wrong. In my view it is where we get a lot of our social problems. The Government has to declare for or against, because the Minister's colleague, the Minister for Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government, Deputy Simon Coveney, is drawing up a plan and it seems to be more about conglomeration and what they call critical mass, which is absolutely ridiculous in the internet age, than it is about facilitating people to live where they want. I will ask very straight question here today and I will only make one final point because time is short. Does the Minister see a conscious effort to try to change the settlement pattern of the past?

Most people did not live in street villages but rather in townlands. Does the Minister see a conscious effort to try to change that and move people out of the countryside into towns and villages? Is that part of Government policy, as it seems to be? As I pointed out before, it even seems to be in the action plan. We need an honest answer on this one. If it is so, what is the advantage, as I can give plenty of disadvantages? If we want to find pockets of social difficulties for children with drugs etc., we will find it in socially segregated housing estates in our towns. We have to ask where the Slaughtneils, the Ballyheas and St. Thomas' come from. They are examples of small populations producing fantastic results and why is that? It is something in the construction of the communities.

We must ask the fundamental question of what is the Minister's vision for rural Ireland and is it one where we will push people into towns and villages? That is the policy of most of the Departments and particularly the Department of Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government. One-off council houses are not being built in the countryside and in Galway housing loans are not being given for a one-off house. All the documents produced by the Department, including the recently published document, are pushing us into towns and villages. If that is not the Minister's policy, what is she going to do to change the policy of the Department of Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government, which is in that direction? I have a suspicion that the Minister of State, Deputy Ring, knows in his heart and soul I am not talking about politics here. It is something about which I have been consistent since I moved from Dublin 4 to Connemara. There is a value for life in real rural Ireland and there is real geography in it. It is not about scattered houses but communities that function. The Internet has made that viable into the future.

I have a second plea. I spent 18 years as a co-operative manager in a small community co-op in Corr na Móna. We set up many enterprises, some of which succeeded and some which failed. One that succeeded - I did not make it successful - metamorphosed into what is now called ECC Teoranta, which is a massive timber mill. We need roads and broadband, which is obvious, but one other element is needed. I can give both the problem and the answer. The problem is that businesses in start-up mode need cash investment, possibly through preference shares that could be paid for when the company turns a corner, which normally takes four or five months. Will the Minister consider going to the Minister for Finance and asking him for €100 million to be given to the Western Development Commission? It can be 20-year money or whatever but it should be invested in rural enterprise. Rural start-ups will not get this from venture funds of banks but this would allow rural enterprises to get their hands on cash. The Minister can look at the likes of McHale and I can guarantee her that if she provides the money, she will get the return. We have starved rural Ireland for too long. Amounts of €5,000, €10,000 and €20,000 are a joke if somebody is trying to set up a real industry anywhere in the country, and the rural areas are no different from urban areas in that regard.