Peter Mathews (Dublin South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I would like to congratulate Deputy Doyle and his sub-committee on the production of this report. While I admit that I have not read it, the Members who have contributed to today's debate have enabled me to capture the essence of the report and its understanding of where we stand as an island country. All of the contributions have been hugely instructive and very revealing to me as someone who grew up in the city, essentially - in the metropolis of Dublin. Like Deputy Mitchell O'Connor, I spent summers in my school and student days along the coastline and on the islands of this country.

Ireland is made up of the lands, coastal areas and islands we have. I refer to the seas, mountains, rivers and lakes and the people who live here. As I was just thinking about the coastal and island periphery of this country, I was struck by the analogy of the rose tree. The leaves must be healthy so that the plant - the tree itself - should be healthy. If the leaves that feed the rose bush are affected by black spot or other diseases, it behoves the gardener to pay attention to such diseases. The islands, the coasts and the people who live there are like the leaves of the nation. It will be to our cost if we do not provide sunlight and nourishment to the leaves.

We have heard about the cultural understanding of our survival as human beings in an environment which is mild, temperate and oceanic. That is the reality of our lives. When we analyse things into scientific and metric-type language, we can sometimes lose the essence of that experience. A debate like this is important for Members who are involved in the Departments that harness the main resources of the country. We talk in big numbers, like 100,000 new jobs in factories, but we lose the reality of the pop-up ideas and reflex pictures that instinctively come about in the minds of everybody.

There is a poetry and music of our lives, a synthesis of our lives, that is important to understand and appreciate so we can get the communication nerves of broadband to the coastal and island areas, where people who are benefitting from the rhythms of nature and the seasons can feed those in the cities who are starved of those realities and experiences. The madness of living on the twelfth floor of a concrete block, the noise that comes from metropolitan living, the pace and the visual and aural disturbance of living in the city are upsetting to the human soul. In the coastal areas and on the islands human beings can still be the repositories of what makes sense as human beings. We listen to the lives of the people who are fishing or farming or exchanging educational ideas, so it is important to have all of those organs of humanity functioning, living and breathing well.

This might sound like a big diversion from the excellent critiques of the recommendations in the report, which had to be made------

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