Marc MacSharry (Sligo-Leitrim, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I have to say, with the best of respect, that the one thing that has been missing in this, and the Minister can ask my parliamentary assistant and secretarial assistant in Sligo, or each of the representatives present, or everybody throughout the House, or indeed county councillors, and this is why I announced the successes at the beginning and welcomed them so that the Minister did not have to repeat them, but she has repeated them for everybody, is a bit of humility around the fact a major mistake was made. When you fail to prepare you prepare to fail. If we announced this evening that the tickets for the All-Ireland final next year were to be free and were stupid enough to expect that only 20% extra capacity would be required, then there is a real problem. I have to say there should be a little bit of humility.

We have had examples from everybody but one example regarding concessionary tickets is in Knocknahur, County Sligo. The Healy family have had concessionary tickets for 16 years as the children were being raised. They paid for them but were told they were too late. They cannot ring their employer and say "No". Those people are equal citizens, by the way. They all have votes in Kerry as well as in Sligo-Leitrim.

There is a need for a basic acknowledgement from Government that while it was set up with the best will in the world to help families and while 124,000 are being helped, as the Minister tells us ad nauseam, 6,000 have been discommoded, and whether it was the fault of the Minister, an official or Bus Éireann, that failure needs to be acknowledged. We do not need to be told constantly how great things are, because we are in the help business in politics, as the Minister knows. We are not here to slap each other on the back. We are here to identify problems and seek solutions. I call on the Minister to acknowledge the mistake and to ensure, in the interests of everybody, that those 6,000 people are looked after from a transport perspective in the budget next week.