Danny Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent)
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I am sorry I had to leave but before I left, there was a discussion about forestry. Are the representatives aware of the restrictions on planting marginal ground in places like Kerry? Can anything be done about that, given 80% green ground must be planted vis-à-vis 20% of marginal ground? It is the other way round in south Kerry. If someone is lucky, he has 20% green ground and 80% marginal ground.

Fish lorries travel through my village all day and all night. Why can we not have processing plants in counties along the west coast rather than exporting all the fish without being processed? Why can we not tap into that? Hundreds of jobs could be provided processing more of the fish being caught off our coast.

Mr. Keenan referred to the Leader programme and the bottom-up approach. I only hope he and more like him talked to Mr. Phil Hogan before he did what he did to this country and to the Leader programme. Mr. Coyne outlined all the stages that have to be gone through. His company can go through them because it is on its own but our Leader companies were not left operate on their own and they will have to go through the local authority as well. Even though Leader funding has been halved, my worry is that what we have got will not be spent at all because of the restrictions. It is like every other grant that is announced. There are so many restrictions and people required to sign off on them that, as I have always said, the money is not there and they are holding it up with red tape so that it is still there to announce again next year and the year after. That is what happening with the housing. It is the same with every programme. They are just holding up the money with red tape and restrictions and no man is prepared to sign off anything.