Michael Fitzmaurice (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

With all due respect, whoever wrote that reply did not even look at what we were talking about. We are talking about small villages and towns. Deputy Éamon Ó Cuív provided the Minister of State with statistics for the numbers of positions which remain unfilled nationally. We are not worried about all of the things that civil servant, or whoever it was, wrote that long palaver. We are talking about ordinary people from County Donegal to County Cork and from Connemara to Dublin who are trying to keep villages in shape and cannot fill positions. The Minister of State should tell the civil servant concerned that they cannot fill the positions, yet he or she has given us a palaver on a piece of paper about everything bar what we want to know. We need solutions. We need to put people in a position where they can stay in a job, particularly if they are over 55 years of age. As Deputy Éamon Ó Cuív pointed out, it is worth €5,000 extra a year. What is the value to tourism of what the people in question have done throughout the country in every small village and town? That is what we need to address, not the rigmarole in the reply.

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