Michelle Mulherin (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

-----commute to at weekends. We live in a lovely spot but I have a bigger ambition. Everyone here has a bigger ambition for rural Ireland than the way it is at present. I welcomed the town and village enhancement scheme. We need a particular stimulus to identify our town cores in rural towns and villages. They are market towns. How do we bring people to live in them and how do we look after independent traders in those towns and villages to give them life? We should build, project and plan for some population growth in the future. We see it happening in the cities. We do not need to do a thing for it to happen in the cities because that is the natural order of things. Cities will keep growing. They will be congested and we will miss out on opportunities because they are too congested. Galway has been described like that. The key point I am making on the west is that we have to come up with a plan that has sufficient detail in order that it does not make a county such as Mayo a place where people just commute out of because there is a road going to Galway or Sligo. It is not just Mayo. It is the same story in east Galway and Ballinasloe which are right beside Galway, but there is no trickle-down effect or benefit to the rural areas from these big cities. That is the reality.

The Minister of State said he will tease out the issue of how we will develop the regions. If we do not tease it out in this committee with everybody here, we can forget it. If we do not tease it out here, we will have a capital investment plan that will throw money at the big urban centres again. Public transport is an issue. Every time we see a report coming out from the National Transport Authority, it says it is going to shut down the railway lines into the west except for Limerick. It is incredible. We need to accelerate what we are doing and not just look around the country and say we are doing a little bit here and there. We need a massive injection into a massive area of the country that has an awful lot to offer in addressing the problems facing the country. If we do not consider what we need to do to get these areas going, including the Atlantic economic corridor where there are jobs and where young people can live and have families, then we are wasting our time.