Councillor John Sheehan:

I thank the members for their questions and opinions on what has been presented today. A lot has been said and trying to cover it all will not be easy. It comes down to two different things. The common theme is the disconnect and how we get a proper connection between what people hear on the ground about Europe and what they want to contribute to Europe. Sometimes, we have been guilty as a member state of using derogations and hiding behind Europe as the dictator of the bad policy that we have to implement at local level. In response to Senator Leyden, I come from an area that is in a Special Protection Area, SPA also. There are land restrictions. There is a man who canvassed for 17 hours a day for Deputy Michael Fitzmaurice and I congratulate the Deputy on his election to the Dáil. The man did that because he felt European directives were taking away his livelihood. We have that on our side of the world also; the area is protected because of a bird - the hen harrier. The lands cannot be reclaimed which is in total contradiction to the Food Harvest 2020 policy which one arm of the State, the Department of Agriculture, is trying to implement. The Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht and the National Parks and Wildlife Service dictate another policy. There is no interconnection. The one thing they will do is state that European policy on an agricultural basis globally is good but they will want to blame Europe for the designations of the restricted areas. That is where the disconnect occurs and causes angst about what Europe is doing. We have to turn the mirror on ourselves - as a member state - to identify how we get the message from Brussels to the people. That is a very important point.

Deputies O'Reilly and Durkan mentioned our network and our infrastructures. We did quite a lot when we had a few bob to do it. In fairness to all previous Governments, we nearly got there on the orbital routes of our motorways. There are currently some motorways going nowhere and we need to construct orbital routes - connecting Limerick to Cork and Dundalk to Sligo and then continuing on to Galway - when we have the money. When those are in place, the infrastructure will be there. It is all about lifestyle choice. That may refer back to what Deputy Byrne spoke on, some of our youth wanting to leave. They are highly educated but they decided - some by choice - to move. We are after going through a period of austerity and they possibly felt that this was not the place to be at the moment if they were to move up along the ladder and that there were better opportunities elsewhere. We need to create an Ireland to which they can return.

It is probably about lifestyle choice. Not everyone wants to live in the cauldron of the city, in particular the cauldron of Dublin given the expense and so forth involved. Even some of the companies bringing foreign direct investment, FDIs are looking at our regional cities to see if all their requirements - education and other matters - can be met to set up business. We have benefitted from that in Limerick city. If it can be brought to the regions and the regional cities, it would be possible to branch out into the services industry which could locate in some of our regional towns. Then we could start to pick up the jobs we do not seem to be able to hold. There is a cohort of people in jobs that might not want to reskill. The horse will not always drink the water. Some people do not want to participate in reskilling opportunities. We have to find a way to get those jobs nearer to these people in the regions because they are not able to come to the cauldrons of the bigger populations to get those jobs.

Deputy Durkan mentioned energy. It is one example of where we got it wrong in Ireland on competition law. We had a fine utility company, the Electricity Supply Board, ESB, which supplies us with power at a cost a lot less than for what it is being supplied to other people throughout Europe. We decided under competition law which was brought to us, that we had to raise the price of energy to make it competitive for somebody else to come in to the market. We now have a utility company called Irish Water. I hope we do not go down the road of having to raise the bar for somebody from Spain or somewhere else to come in and run our water for us. We did things that were not right. This is an opportunity to put it into the Europe 2020 strategy.