Danny Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Our heritage is important in the context of selling our tourism product. There is a difficulty with the current set-up in rural areas. Heretofore, visitors came to small villages and the meeting place was usually a pub and the visitors enjoyed those, but most of the local pubs have now closed. We are losing one of our selling points because people really enjoyed the old fellow singing the local song, telling the local story or playing the local tune, and people came from all over the world for that. We are at the point of losing that completely with new rules and regulations and everything else. Rural life and the number of rural people are in decline. We are losing that aspect and I do not know how it can be addressed.

Dr. O'Keeffe stated that this is now available on the Internet. It is a problem that people abroad can get to know everything about us without coming to visit us at all, so in one way it is great, and in another it is not. I appreciate what Dr. O'Keeffe is doing in the schools. It will be the only way the youngsters get to know what we were before, what the people before us did and how we got here.