Jack Wall (Kildare South, Labour)

I will be parochial on this issue. I am delighted to see the Minister has satisfied my colleague, the Minister of State, Deputy McGuinness, with regard to Carlow-Kilkenny. The same cannot be said for south Kildare area, where there are five IDA sites. When I wrote to the Minister about this, he accepted he would meet me but that meeting never took place, unfortunately. In the past five years, only three visits to south Kildare have been organised by the IDA and, of those, only one resulted in a second visit.

The Minister of State, Deputy McGuinness, can explain to the Minister that if one is travelling through Kildare in the morning, all one will see is a red necklace of cars ahead. Everyone is travelling out of Castledermot, Athy, Monasterevin, Kildare and Kilcullen, where there has been no development for many years. There has been a haemorrhage of jobs and a list as long as my arm of closures over the years.

I hope the Minister will reconsider this issue. I have continually put down questions on what the IDA intends to do with the lands. All it has done is to put the Monasterevin GAA club off land it has not been able to sell for five years. It is a joke. I want the Minister to honour his commitment to meet the three Oireachtas Members from Kildare South, if that is the road he wants to take. In the initial stages, he promised me he would meet me but it never happened. If he wants to honour his commitment to meet, I have no problem who he meets. However, there is a need to meet someone with regard to that area. We have seen development in Carlow and other areas but, while there is an unemployment blackspot in south Kildare, there have been only three IDA visits in five years.

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