Luke Flanagan (Roscommon-South Leitrim, Independent)

This is the reason I am doing this. I am not doing it for populism. I believe in issues that are not popular as well. I will bring a Bill before the Dáil in January and February next. Then the Government will accuse me, not of populism but of naivety. I go with what I believe in, whether it is popular or not.

It is a well-known fact that to deal with a problem, one must first acknowledge that there is a problem. I stated yesterday that we need a plan for rural Ireland and that my proposed changes to the Education Act will not solve the problems of small schools on its own. This Bill will merely act as a dam to prevent the further erosion of their existence. What will build up behind this dam is up to the Government. If we do not make the right decisions for rural Ireland, then that dam will burst inevitably and rural Ireland will die anyway. If the right decisions are made on rural regeneration, then the future of the areas I love will be saved.

From listening to the contributions of the Government side, however, one would believe that rural Ireland's future is not under threat. The Government is in total denial about this. Until it recognises this fact, the future of small schools will be under constant threat of erosion and, eventually, extinction. In fact, one of the Government Deputies yesterday expressed his desire to see all schools with fewer than four teachers closed. I wonder, when rural Government Deputies dismiss the idea of the decline of rural areas, whether they are going around with blinkers on. The decline is nothing new. It is something that has slowly but surely happened in my area since the 1950s.

What I am going to say now I said in every hall in which I spoke in before the election. I also said it in the Chamber once. If you cannot improve on it, keep saying it. I am going to keep saying this until the Government finally gets the message.

There is a closed shop called Mannion's on the Ballymoe Road out of my town of Castlerea. When one looks at it now, it appears like a strange place for a shop to be. Who would ever have used it? I have spoken to many people in that area and they tell me there was a time when it thrived. Five statute miles - excuse my language but there are people around my area who use it - from my home is a village called Castleplunkett. It once was a thriving village with four shops. There are now no shops left. Then again, one might ask, what would they need them for as it is only a small area. Seven statute miles in the opposite direction is a town called Ballinlough. I am told that at one stage this town had 12 shops in it; now it has two. How long before it, like Castleplunkett, has none?

Let us look at my home town. At one stage, we had more than 50 thriving shops, two cinemas, three dance halls, three bakeries - I could go on. Now, we have only a handful of businesses left. Where will we be in ten years' time? Will people be saying the same about Castlerea as they are about towns of the country such as Castleplunkett? When people see the empty derelict shopfronts of Castlerea, will they ask why put a shop in such a small town? I use the example of my own town because I know it best, but the same question could be asked of towns such as Ballyhaunis in Mayo, Dunmore in Galway, Ballaghaderreen in west Roscommon and hundreds of other small towns. Where is the future? If one fails to plan then one plans to fail. The denial of the fact that future existence of rural Ireland is not a given means either we plan now or there will be nothing to plan for within a generation.

Far from planning a future for these areas, the Government is proactively dismantling them. There has been the closure of our post offices and Garda stations. In many cases, all that is now left to identify an area as having a human settlement is that of the local school. In the budget, the Minister, Deputy Quinn created a template for fast-tracking the rapid demise of many of these schools. He does not even have the guts to come in here to defend it today. Apologies for discussing it again, but we will discuss it until the issue is dealt with. The Government's core argument is that these areas no longer deserve to have a school because numbers are low. It is time for that argument to be turned on its head. The thinking from now on must be why there are so few people in these areas and how, through Government policy, this situation can be reversed. One way of not achieving this is to close the two, three and four teacher schools by stealth. Once closed, they will never open again.

I heard some Government Deputies yesterday and today inform me we are only losing a handful of schools every year. Is that meant to be okay? The question is when was the last time a new rural school opened? Maybe the Government would like us all to move to new towns such as Adamstown. I will not be moving there. I am staying in my town because I love it. Once a school is closed and people from that area are coerced into the next nearest school, people eventually leave that area in order to be closer to the new school. With it go the local shops I mentioned because people use the shops near their school, and the old areas die and never recover.

It is bad enough that rural Government Deputies dismiss the idea of rural decline by saying that only a handful of schools are lost but, worse still, they are now backing a plan which will systematically lead to the eventual closure of hundreds of schools. It reminds me of an episode of "Sesame Street" and a scene from Ernie and Bert's house from many years ago. Bert was always the boss and Ernie always did what he was told. He was meant to, anyway. Bert put a plate of biscuits on the table before he went to bed and he told Ernie to leave them until the next morning. Ernie liked his biscuits but he thought he could cod Burt. He nibbled away at the outside of the biscuits, headed back to bed and thought it would not be noticed. He got up again in the middle of the night, and one can guess what happened by the following morning - all the biscuits were gone. One can guess what the Minister, Deputy Quinn, is trying to do. He will nibble away at these schools, as it were, he will tell us nothing is to happen to them, but some morning we will get up and they will be gone.

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