Mr. John McGrane:

To build on Deputy Shanahan's theme and on what Ms Crowe has rightly said, there is a picture beyond just the immediacy of the issues, which are very important. It is the question of what kind of Ireland do we want to have in five, ten, 25 and 100 years from now. We have done amazing things to get to here and we have catalogued the various contributing factors not least our home-grown enterprise community. Ms Crowe talked about the hollowing out of traditional country or provincial life not from some postcard image of 100 years ago but from where we live now. I mean what do we want to have. When we talk about a national strategy for the home-grown enterprise community it is absolutely bound up in that sense of what is our enterprise for. It is for the sustaining of lives and livelihoods in our towns and villages right across the length of the nation. We have catalogued some of the impediments, and we will get through them all, but we need to catalogue all of them. For instance, rates is an outdated methodology to pay for services. Rates are now paid for by all our local indigenous businesses. In the retail sector, whether it is clothing or certain food products and other items, online deliveries by a global company that does not pay rates in the community does not make sense in a modern Ireland. This is about standing back and reworking the total numbers, which is the money in and the money out, and saying that we can do this better even if it takes us a year of hard work to do so. In the meantime, we must keep the lights on and must keep communications running. My colleague, Ms Kehoe, will tell the committee about a situation where we have a broadband strategy, which simply is not working either, and that is damaging employment and community life.