Mr. John Walsh:

I agree with Deputy Ó Cuív about the land banks on the islands. At the moment, we are looking at a farm that has come up for sale on Bere Island and the community is on board with that. If we could buy it, we could use it for a number of things. We need a community centre and childcare, as stated earlier. We could also have social and affordable housing and sites for people to purchase, as it is very difficult to buy a single site. I approached the council and while I received a very nice email from back from it, it just showed all of the problems. Sometimes the local authority needs to show leadership and instigate these things. Much of the time it waits for islanders to do it and then roadblocks are put in our way, which is very frustrating.

Road transport is the other side of it. I am on the board of Cork Local Link. While the National Transport Authority is a great organisation and provides a lot of resources, it has too much say and too much authority in the delivery of local services. The board of any Local Link should be in a much better position to say where stops and where routes should be. We are one of four Local Link services which provide our own buses. We create employment for people on community employment, CE, schemes and rural social schemes, RSS, as bus drivers. It makes the service very adaptable but it looks like that is not really favoured. The National Transport Authority seems to want to go down the route of subcontracted out services or tendered services which we do not agree with.

The last thing is fibre to islands. I spoke to the Chair on Clare Island yesterday and we discussed this issue. He said that when rural electrification came in, a socket and a light were put into each house and that was it. They then discovered down the line that they could cook food, wash clothes and have outside lighting with electricity. They then brought that in. This is the same. If we do not get fibre into every house in Ireland, which should be the case, we will always be up against it. I dealt with Eircom over the years and did a deal with Eircom to upgrade the exchange on Bere Island from dial-up to broadband. That lasted for approximately three years but the speed was no longer good enough. I tried to do a deal with it again to lay cable but because the national broadband plan was coming in, it was not able to deal with us because we were one of the 300 houses in that deal. Fibre to the islands has to happen. Yesterday on Clare Island, we saw what was possible with the different technologies for e-health. There is a big world out there but we need to have proper connectivity for all of rural Ireland, but especially the islands.