Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing my time with Deputy Danny Healy-Rae. I will take 20 minutes and Deputy Healy-Rae will take ten.

I am delighted to be able to speak this evening on the wonderful aims and big announcements. When I opened the national development plan and looked for references to Tipperary, I found just two instances despite it being the sixth largest county in the State. One was on a map of Ireland and the other was on the Irish Bioeconomy Foundation in Tipperary. That was it. Last night when I looked through it again, on page 40 I saw a picture of four cailíní in Clonmel a couple of years ago ag rince seit ar an tsráid, on the street. As my daughter was included in the picture as well, I had better declare that in case they say I have an interest and did not declare it.

Things were slightly better when I researched the national planning framework document and found 16 references to Tipperary. However, four were simply for photos and another one was a reference to Tipperary on a map of Ireland. The rest of the references mainly referred to the excellent work of Tipperary Energy Agency, which is internationally recognised and I recognise that myself. It is leading research and delivering community initiatives such as SuperHomes, Better Energy Communities, Insulate Tipp etc. I salute them and the work they do and the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, SEAI, as well. Tipperary is home to Cloughjordan ecovillage and Templederry community wind farm, which I 100% support.

There are some positives. As part of the capital investment plan, South Tipperary General Hospital, which was formerly known as St. Joseph's - I still affectionately call it St. Joseph's although somebody decided to change it - received €3.2 million for the provision of a new outpatient clinic. The total investment in South Tipperary General Hospital amounts to just under €50 million but again this has been announced and re-announced and recycled.

Looking to the future and 2040, Tipperary County Council in a submission to the national planning framework developed several key strategic aims that included strong prosperous towns which are vibrant and viable, economically self-sufficient and quality places to live and work. That is not happening. Our towns are being denuded. We saw it today when my colleague, Deputy Danny Healy-Rae found that only three towns in County Kerry can even avail of grants for the upgrading of semi-derelict houses to house people. He was told by the Minister of State's boss, the Taoiseach, that it was not true but it is what we are being told on the ground.

There is a lot of spin coming out of Government Buildings, especially with the Taoiseach's new €5 million spinning machine. The document refers to revitalised attractive villages providing local services and employment opportunities for sectors of the community. That is just literally aspirational. We all know the villages. They are dying on their feet. The Government will not allow any development and many of them have not got sewerage schemes, as was also advanced today by Deputy Danny Healy-Rae. I refer to "A county which is delivering effective regional development through co-operation and collaboration with its partners in the Southern Region." Finally, there is reference to "a connected county with excellent strategic, road and rail infrastructure." I am sorry for laughing but I have to laugh. The people who wrote this must have never left Dublin 4. As Deputy Pringle just said and as the Leas-Cheann Comhairle said himself, this is just dóchas at best. Unfortunately however, there is almost next to nothing in Project Ireland 2040 that will escalate the delivery of all those aims. Indeed if Tipperary does benefit through either of the two strands, the national planning framework, NPF, or the national development plan, NDP, it will almost be by accident rather than by design.

I have to stray a small bit with the indulgence of the Leas-Cheann Comhairle. I was in here for nine minutes this evening to hear the contribution of the former Minister, Deputy Kelly, or AK47 as we used to call him. I heard him and heard the double standards, after the ruin he brought on our country with his Labour Party in the last Government, and then he has the cheek to attack this for not having been voted through. It was not voted through here, he is right there, but neither was the decision to abolish town councils and borough district councils. That was not voted through either, there was no vote on it in this House and he was a senior Minister in government that time. For him now to be latching on to this to try and reincarnate himself as some kind of a saviour of rural Ireland is just sickening to the people of Tipperary who I represent.

The national planning framework, we are told, aims to bring about balanced regional development with an expectation that the capital's economic dominance and expansion will grow at a slower rate in the next few years. Then there is the national development plan, which is to be rolled out over the course of ten years at a cost of €115 billion and which is aimed at upgrading State infrastructure. The public, and particularly the people of Tipperary will be forgiven for being sceptical about all of this. Why would we not be sceptical? Has the Government forgotten that we have already had almost six years of national and regional jobs strategies? What has come of these for rural Ireland in particular? Has the Government forgotten that so much of what it promised and announced in the national development plan was already announced in the plan to revitalise rural Ireland about which we have heard so much in recent times?

When the former Taoiseach, God be good to him and he is here with us and still alive, thank God, went out to Edgeworthstown - "The Four Roads to Glenamaddy" I called it - what he was not going to do? It was all on paper and spin but no delivery of anything with the country falling down around him still and it continued to fall down around him.

What about the national broadband plan? Where is that? We have more roll-outs than we have hot dinners and still nothing for rural Ireland. This project alone, if it fails to be rolled out quickly, will rapidly and decisively undermine any plans for industrial or commercial development in rural counties. We had the harsh weather last week with the bit of snow that is gone but is supposed to come back tonight and disappear again tomorrow. This this plan will be the same. The first ray of sunshine will melt it because anyone who wants to dig down and investigate it will know it as a combination of former things that were already announced, spin and regurgitation and an effort for Fine Gael to launch its election manifesto.

I wonder where the Independent Alliance is. It does not seem to be anywhere in this. All the Minister, Deputy Ross, is concerned about is locking up the people of rural Ireland if they allow their L-plate drivers go out on the road or cross the yard with a tractor or anything else. While I welcome the fact that roads like the M20 motorway between Cork and Limerick will be built at the cost of €900 million, I need to inform the Minister that quite recently the chief executive of Tipperary County Council, Joe MacGrath, estimated that it would take €190 million just to repair and maintain the roads in much of Tipperary. Where are we going with €900 million for this road from Cork? Again the Taoiseach, Deputy Varadkar, was on an early morning raid. He would have been great in the time of the Troubles if he was around, because of his dawn raids that he makes all the time. He went to Cork and announced this road prematurely. When I took up the phone to ring the Minister, Deputy Ross, several months ago now, it was the first he had heard of it and there was no money for it. What is going on? They are playing politics with the life and future of our country. We had a proposition on the table for the Limerick to Waterford route, Limerick to Cahir in the first aspect of it, which would bypass Pallasgreen.

There was a compulsory purchase order, CPO, made on the Pallasgreen to Cahir route, and a design was drawn up. We would also have a bypass of the chronic situation in Tipperary town. One cannot walk the streets. The streets cannot be repaired; nothing can be done with them. We need that bypass. The town is stifled and it is being stagnated further by this severe rejection of the proposals to bring the road from Limerick to Cahir. I have nothing against the Limerick to Cork motorway but Limerick to Cahir was €380 million cheaper. It adds 18 to 20 minutes to the journey, but we wanted an M8 junction in Cahir, which is the crossroads of Munster. The motorway to Dublin and the M8 motorway to Cork are totally underutlised. The proposal made perfect sense, but politically it was not okay for the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Deputy Creed, and the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Deputy Coveney, and other people from Cork. They are now insisting that there is no money, even for preliminary investigations or studies to be carried out.

Limerick to Cork sounded good and it looked good. It was announced in Cork first and then the Ministers went to Sligo to announce this one. They went to Sligo just to give the impression that it was not a Dublin-centric plan. It is Dublin-centric. Everything goes to Dublin. I contend - my colleague made the same point last night - that there are too many public service vehicles in Dublin. There is no room for any more. New Luas units are being built and more have been ordered but they cannot cross O'Connell Bridge. They do not fit, and they block the buses and the bicycles and everything else. There are too many buses already. More momentum should be put into green energy and into electric. There are taxis, many of which are private, and I salute them for the efforts they are trying to make. There are Luas, DART and rail services. I am not begrudging one thing Dublin has but it is oversupplied and different transport modes are in one another's way because of bad planning.

There have been enormous efforts to starve the rest of the country and give everything to the capital. Successive reports from the OECD and many other sources have stated that 53% or 54% of our national economic activity is inside the Pale. That is about 20% higher than any other European capital. There is bedlam in Dublin. One cannot get a bed or get office space - although I know more office space is being built - but above all people cannot get houses. We also do not have a functioning transport system. It takes me three hours to get out of here of an evening, if I leave after 3 p.m., to get down below Naas. Everything is happening here. There is a sense of madness. The cranes are up again. When we walk out of Leinster House tonight and look up it is nice to see them. They are not building houses. We saw what the last boom brought us. It brought us bedlam and a total crash and bang. It was boasted that there were more cranes in Dublin than in London. Where did it get us? A heap of brus on the floor like a heap of kippins that would not even burn in the fire.It has caused tragedy and devastation in people's lives.

The results are now clear. The Government will not face the vulture funds and take them on. It will not stand with the people who want to house themselves, people who did nothing wrong to anyone. People wanted to get planning permission, to save their wages and get loans so that they could build houses for themselves. We have now been told that Tipperary will have a cap of 480 new houses. To hell with the people. I said earlier that former Ministers Kelly and Hogan did more damage to rural Ireland than Cromwell did. To hell or to Connacht, it was said. We cannot even go to Connacht any more because there is no train route to it.

I am disappointed that no senior Minister is in the House tonight to listen to this. I mean no disrespect to the Minister of State at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Deputy McEntee. The Ministers do not want to listen to it. I am disappointed that they cannot face the people. There was no meaningful debate. The Minister, Deputy Coveney, had a presentation in the audiovisual room in 2016 where he committed to coming in to the House to have a full debate on the issue and said that it would have to be passed by the Oireachtas. He is flouting his responsibilities to the people. The people gave the Government a severe wallop, as iar-Taoiseach Kenny called it, the last time. Why would they not? The Government thought the people were irrelevant and thought it could manage without them. They were fed on a diet of liberal legislation for five years - the Labour Party included. I warned Labour about what would happen to it. I said that it would come back in a car and it came back in a seven-seater. Deputy Kelly then sought the leadership and he could not get anyone to second him. That is the sort of confidence people have in him and he expects the people of Tipperary to have it in him now, despite the ruin he brought on rural Ireland with all the different legislation he brought in concerning the tyres on cars etc. I believe there were funny stories behind that. He announced houses all over the county. I am like a bad record, but he would not build a hen house in Kinvara or a dog-shed in Carrick-on-Suir. He would only talk about it. Eleven houses were built in Tipperary by the council in the years 2011 to 2016. That is one and a half houses per year, after all his talk. He is now going around the country holding meetings with other Deputies, trying to reincarnate himself and act as the saviour of rural Ireland. However, the people of rural Ireland are educated and they are smart and intelligent. All they want to do is to live and be let live and not to be banished from the roads by the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Deputy Ross, and his regressive legislation.

I wondered what kind of water the Cabinet was drinking the other day when it came out and said that any person who lets a learner driver drive unaccompanied would be penalised. I have children myself, as do many Deputies here. All have full licences except for one, who is not on the road yet. Perhaps people cannot afford two cars or perhaps one partner cannot drive. People will have to leave work to come home to drive to college with their sons or daughters. The Government wants us all to be at home, dossing and mooching around. The former Minister for Social Protection, Deputy Burton, said that they all had big screens and mobile phones. She got her answer for that. The Government will get its answer too. The people are waiting for it. They are not putting up with all of this regressive legislation, none of which is rural-proofed.

The Government announced this grandiose plan in a spin of glory in an attempt to win more popularity for the Taoiseach. I met the head of the IDA last year in Washington, who told me that he cannot get a company to invest anywhere outside of Dublin now. That is an issue the Government should be dealing with. He told that to the Taoiseach as well; he met him an hour before I met him. In Washington in 2004 I was told the same thing. Companies will not locate in rural Ireland because everything has been invested in Dublin. The people of rural Ireland do not want anything from the Government only to be let live. They want to be the job creators and to be allowed to provide for their families and build houses for them. However, these people cannot get planning. I have met dozens of couples who have sites and the wherewithal to build a house but who cannot get planning. There is every reason in the world to give these people planning. I have heard former Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources, Deputy Eamon Ryan, talking about urban sprawl. That is not the panacea. Our clubs, schools, churches and people need to exist in rural Ireland. People were hunted out of it and starved out of it during the Famine, and this something similar. People are being driven out of rural Ireland now and are being persecuted for living there.

Repairs to the roads in Tipperary will cost an estimated €200 million. We cannot get this money. We cannot get money for rural social schemes or the new community or local involvement schemes which were announced last November. The Minister for Rural and Community Development, Deputy Ring, was a great man then. What has he been doing? We cannot get money from the Leader programme. We had the best Leader programme in Europe, which was held up all over the world as a model. Big Phil the destroyer, the former Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, destroyed it because, he said, he wanted to give power to the Fine Gael councils. I heard him saying it at different times. This approach was supported by Deputy Kelly. It ruined Leader. The Government has been trying to restart the programme for the past three years and barely a penny has been given out so far, perhaps €30 million from a €400 million programme. That €400 million itself represents a drop from well over €1.4 billion in the last Leader programme. The money was given out to local improvement schemes. I have no problem with a portion of it being given out to that end, but that money was supposed to support community projects and private entrepreneurs who wanted to develop rural Ireland. Instead, that money was raided. The same Minister, was also tasked with looking after the post offices. I made the point in here - it was around Holy Thursday - that it was like Pontius Pilate, the way he washed his hands of the post offices and handed them over to Deputy Naughten. He did not want the poisoned chalice of the post offices. He was not interested in supporting the post offices.

We have presented projects in here and demonstrated different models, such as the German model and the New Zealand model as seen with Kiwibank, among others, which showed that banking could be handled by post offices. This is being resisted because the Government is in bed with the banks. The Government refuses to pass legislation to deal with the vulture funds. The banks now want to offload their dirty work onto vulture funds. The Government is saying that it is not happening. However, I have had people ringing me - and I am sure the Minister of State has had people ringing her too - who are with Permanent TSB and who have made settlements, but part of the money is parked and they are paying away as best they can. These people are now terrified. They are sick and worried about the vulture funds. These vulture funds are nameless and shameless. They will not come before the Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach, to account for themselves. This book of 20,000 loans represents families. The Government thinks we are talking about a commodity, like cattle at a mart. We are talking about human lives. How many suicides have we had? How many families and marriages have been devastated by this? It has caused pressure and sickness. People feel they are unable to look after their families because of the pressure from the banks. Marauding thugs - I call them the third force - are going out and beating up fathers and sons on the side of the road and seizing machinery and everything else. I have brought this issue up on the floor of this Chamber. This is happening; I am not living in dreamland. The banks can do what they like. The cabals organised a couple of court cases and had people in the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions shredding some files and burning others. It would not happen in the Congo. What is going on here would not happen in a Third World country. It is going on here with impunity under the Government's watch. All it can come up with is this 140-page, raggle-taggle plan.

Some 170 projects have been announced already, a number of them two and three times over, and more of them have been cobbled together. If we are paying the spin doctors and senior civil servants to cobble all of this together at the behest of their masters, it is a sad reflection on what our country has come to in 2018, two years after celebrating the centenary of the 1916 martyrs and the people who gave us our freedom.

In the same way, I keep asking the Minister, Deputy Naughten, about the post offices. We meet him every two weeks. We lost 33 postmen in Tipperary. I believe 180 had to be let go across the country, and there are 1,000 people working in the GPO. I presume some of them are working hard but there is dead weight there also, and the unions have to answer for keeping them in there. Each time there is a cut, it is the ordinary bean an phoist and fear an phoist in the oifig an phoist who are amach ar an mbóthar. They are the ordinary people who are penalised and cut all the time. The Government view is that we must trim all of them but not touch the dead weight inside the centre of the department in the GPO. There are more people working in the GPO now than when Padraig Pearse was there, but what the hell are they doing? They should get out and do meaningful work and allow the ordinary post offices have a banking service. Give them the motor taxation service. The Minister, Deputy Ross, has moved to the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport. I asked the Minister, Deputy Ross, months ago to allow the post offices offer a motor taxation service. He thought I was pulling a fast one or that something shady was going on, but he should allow the post offices to do motor taxation as they are ready, willing and able to do it.

We should allow the county housing officials to do the work they want to do on housing. They are crying out for staff. They should move over to there. I have nothing against council officials good, bad or indifferent. I have worked in a motor tax office and every place else. All I am asking of the Minister of State is to be real with the people. Stand up and face them and say, "Look, we are in this together". Ní neart go cur le chéile. Bring back the meitheal philosophy. We do not want spin and jocose announcements of projects we know we will never see, projects that have been announced several times previously. People are too smart for that.

I ask the media to drill down on this and expose it for what it is, namely, a fraud and a misplaced plan being perpetrated on the people of Ireland. However, the people are a smart and educated electorate, and they will be waiting on the Government again. I told the Government they were waiting in the long grass the previous time. They were, and they will wait again. They will come out and go into the ballot box with the peann luaidhe, the little pencil, and there will be no spin machine for the Taoiseach, Deputy Varadkar. Nothing will penetrate the ballot box and they will put uimhir a haon, uimhir a naoi or maybe uimhir a deich on the ballot paper and he will get his answer.

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