Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Practice makes perfect. I bow to the Leas-Cheann Comhairle's experience. He is a long time in the business. It happened. It is a bad day when one does not learn something. If the Leas-Cheann Comhairle has something to tell me afterwards I would appreciate it. I am always in the L-driving category as far as learning is concerned. I have no monopoly on any issues. The reality has been the complete opposite. We have a crazy situation. What on earth is going on when a service that was delivered almost perfectly for many years by the local authorities - we all had a great relationship with them - was taken away and reduced to an absolute mess by three different companies all of which apparently proved their worth in a competitive procurement process. It beggars belief. It is bizarre. My colleagues and many other Deputies raise the issue of An Post every day. It is a crisis at the moment with the post offices. We are interested in having them provide that service to free up the staff in the county council and elsewhere to deal with housing issues. They said they have been short-staffed since the austerity cutbacks. The then Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Deputy Varadkar, said in his reply to me that An Post had submitted a tender for the front office service but was not successful. The other three companies got it. I would love to see the transparency and the tender process. An Post looked for it but did not get it. Teachta Troy is a postmaster and so is Teachta Healy-Rae. We wanted business to keep the post offices open yet we gave it to private companies. They are three companies I had never heard of. They have made a right hames of it. The Minister of State, Deputy Halligan, might know what a hames is; Minister Ross would not know. A hames is something that goes on a horse. From the information I had at the time, it seems An Post made a very robust and efficient delivery of the service proposed but they did not want to know. They decided to close down the post offices saying rural Ireland had too many of them and it did not need them. The NDLS and the companies of which it is comprised have done a spectacularly inept job which leads to one question. How independent are the competitive procurement processes the then Minister, Deputy Varadkar, talked about? One has to scratch one's head and ask what is going on. What is going on in rural Ireland? Why are all these wizz-kid companies and plastic cards there and to hell with the ordinary people?

I did not mention this before and neither did anybody else. I am old enough to remember a time when a Fianna Fáil Minister of State in the Department of the Environment, Ger Connolly, issued thousands of licences with no tests because there was such a backlog of waiting lists for tests. Many of those people have gone to their resting place and their good reward and I hope they are happy but many of them are on the road all of the time. Is that fair? Where is the equity? Under the Constitution we are supposed to treat all citizens equally. Many of them got licences. They just bought them from the county council because the testing system was not able to cope. Thousands of them were issued. Will they be withdrawn? Will they be checked up, brought back and made go for tests? I certainly hope not but I am saying thousands of them are out there. That is what is so farcical about this legislation. It is victimising and terrorising the people of rural Ireland without calling it that. That is what it is doing. It is making them into criminals, which they are not. Most of them are law-abiding people and 99.9% of them are being badly treated by vagabonds, robbers, thieves and marauding thugs. I do not say it for the sake of a history lesson. It is an indication of some of the blatant examples of how drivers in this country have been treated in recent years. It is unbelievable. I did not go near the issue of the contempt for citizens. The attitude is that people should do what we say or we will lock them up and criminalise them. They are the facts. The Minister is around longer than I am to know those licences were handed out.

The proposal in this Bill will soon fall into the same category of unworkable and unenforceable law. The Minister has been warned about it time and again but he will not listen.

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