Thomas Pringle (Donegal South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to contribute to the debate but I wonder why we are spending an entire week discussing the programme for Government, considering the volume of legislation that is guillotined in the normal course. Meanwhile, the Government has set aside a week to clap itself on the back. There have been contortions, twists and turns in the context of how targets have been achieved when, in many cases, they have not been. The theme of this section of the debate with the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation is jobs. As previous speakers said, the Government's policy is to focus on foreign direct investment and achieving jobs growth through the mantra of an export-led recovery. That is fine if one lives in the Pale or on the east coast, but if one lives in County Donegal that amounts to a great deal of empty rhetoric on the part of the Government because there has been no FDI in the county. Investment in rural areas has not been prioritised and the Government has not committed to investing in or developing rural areas or creating jobs to give the people living in them an expectation of finding a job and developing a career for themselves while remaining in their communities.

Families in Donegal have been devastated by emigration. I spoke to a constituent last weekend who has six children. Two have emigrated to Australia, two have emigrated to Canada, one is attending university in England and the sixth child is at home only because he is still at school, but when he completes his schooling he will go on to further education before emigrating. That story is repeated in every community and practically every household in the county. People are rearing their children for emigration. That is an example of the failure of the Government's policies. Up to last September an ad hoc cross-party committee met to discuss the deliberations of the Commission for the Economic Development of Rural Areas, CEDRA, which the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government had initiated and funded. Two earnest men travelled around the country holding public meetings to develop ideas. They were enthusiastic about what could be done for rural areas to stimulate economic development and they listened to the views of the public. A report was supposed to be published last September but it has disappeared off the face of the earth. We cannot find out what is happening regarding CEDRA. Is a report planned? I doubt very much anything will happen because it is not a priority of the Government to protect rural areas and areas outside Dublin. That is a sad reflection on the Government and that will be part of its legacy in respect of job creation.

Letterkenny Institute of Technology, LYIT, has a campus in my home town, Killybegs, which has been established for 50 years. It houses a catering college that was previously run by CERT. The college amalgamated with LYIT in 2007 and this was supposed to copperfasten its future and allow it to evolve into a full third level institution over a period of years. However, LYIT wants to close the facility and bring it back to Letterkenny. The Higher Education Authority says no funding is available to move the college back to the institute's campus, but there is a risk that it will close and be lost altogether. The facility has a significant international reputation for producing the best-quality people to work in the hospitality sector. Last week saw the launch of the Wild Atlantic Way, which comprises 2,500 km of coastline that could be developed with major economic potential, yet a tourism college on the route is under threat because of the model developed by the Government to fund third level institutions. The numbers attending the college are increasing and it could be in a position to finance itself in the future if it were given breathing space, but the Government will not provide that. That are many other similar scenarios.

A total of 26.3% of the workforce in Killybegs are unemployed. The national average is 19% but the rate averages 24% throughout Donegal. That will be the Government's legacy in respect of job creation. The Western Development Commission published a report four years ago on the contribution the creative industries could make in the north west. The commission estimated that by 2018 they could create 18,000 jobs if they were given the ability to develop Internet marketing, but there has been no movement on this. These industries could be developed in rural areas and they could provide jobs, exclusive of FDI, that would keep young people in our communities, ensuring that they continue to grow.

In recent days it has emerged that universal health insurance, UHI, is in serious bother, and that is positive. I hope this proposal dies over the next year because it is not about providing universal health care for our citizens; it is about handing over control of the health service to private companies. This has almost been a disaster in Holland, where competition has shrunk since the introduction of UHI, premiums have skyrocketed and people cannot access treatment in a timely fashion.

I would welcome it if the Government abandoned it completely in the next year. That will have to happen.

Regarding the care of older people and community care, the programme for Government states the Government will invest in the supply of more and better care services for older people in the community and residential settings and that this will be a priority, yet right across County Donegal community hospitals have beds closed because of an embargo by the Government. In my town, Killybegs, we have a 41 bed community hospital in which eight beds are closed because there are no staff to open them. Other community hospitals are overrun with patients. In Letterkenny General Hospital and other hospitals patients cannot get step-down beds to move back into the community because the embargo keeps these beds closed. The programme for Government talks about job creation and caring and providing for older people, but this is not happening. There is a so-called commitment to ring-fence €35 million every year to develop mental health services. We know that money is not being spent, but we still cannot find out exactly where it is going. It is going into the black hole of the health service and not being spent on mental health services. That is the failure within the programme for Government.

The asylum seeker process is a major scandal that will break in years to come. The commitment is that we will introduce comprehensive reforms of the immigration, residency and asylum systems which will include a statutory appeals system and set out rights and obligations in a transparent way, yet people have been in the direct provision system for ten years. That is criminal and an absolute disgrace. Children are being born in direct provision accommodation. Parents have refused to take their children out of care because they would be taking them back into the direct provision system. I wonder if in five, ten or 15 years time we will have a Minister apologising on behalf of the State because of the way these children who will be Irish children by that stage have been treated by the State in a completely dysfunctional system which is effectively a system of open prisons. The Government committed to deal with it, but it has still not done so. People in direct provision accommodation should not be sitting there for three to seven years and, in some cases, up to ten years and more. It is an absolute disgrace and an abuse of their human rights. The Government should ensure the system is reformed and changed.

I could speak for an hour on the programme for Government with no difficulty. These are just some of the highlights I wanted to address. It is a disgrace that we are spending three full days this week debating the programme for Government when there is legislation that could be put through and funding that could be found to deal with some of the priorities about which we are talking.

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