Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It is high-brow enough compared to what I will quote, "Sé dúirt damhán alla le míoltóigín tráth: 'Ó! Tar liom abhaile,". The Minister of State knows what happened the poor old míoltóigín. As spider said to the fly, come home with me. I do not know what it is in English and I do not know it all in Irish.

We know what happened to the fly that was promised all the goodies by the spider. When he went into the web he got eaten up.

If I hear another word about successful cities from economists, the great and good of society and business interests I will feel like exploding. Cities are fine. I grew up in a city. They are certainly fine for certain classes of people but there is huge misery in cities and if anyone doubts it they should come to my clinic next Monday. I face more intractable problems in my clinic in Galway city than I do in my clinic in Connemara. I get more people coming in saying there is nowhere to live in Galway city than I do in Connemara. I get more people coming in saying they have neighbours from hell or they are in an area riddled with drugs in Galway city than I do in Connemara. When I hear of successful cities, and I hear how successful this city is, I recognise that the neck of the woods I grew up in and still stay in when I am here in very successful as it is in the embassy belt but I also recognise there are many places to which I could bring people in the city, and some of them are not far from the House, that the Government itself will say are the basket cases of all basket cases in the country. This is despite the measures it and the Minister, Deputy Ring, always boast about. What is the north city special task force for? Why do I see gardaí in the street with submachine guns if they are in successful cities? Granted, the economy of the city is fine if I take it as a totality on average but averages are very deceiving. The reality is when I consider the good of people I look at the economic, social and cultural parameters and I ask just how good is it.

I heard what Deputy Kyne had to say, that there would be more money if all of the country areas were linked to the city, but I believe there are flaws in the argument. The first flaw is to accept that for a rural area to survive it has to be attached to a major urban area and that is how we finance local government. The consequence of this is quite scary for Donegal, Leitrim, Roscommon and all of the other counties that do not have major urban areas. If I take County Galway without the city it is as urbanised as any of those counties are in their totality. If Galway County Council cannot survive financially without the city, and if the same funding parameters are applied to County Galway as are applied to the other counties that do not have major urban conurbations, and there are more of them than counties with major cities in them, then by God they will also face a big problem financially.

The irony of pouring a lot more resources into cities is that they are inexhaustible in their demand for money. For example, and rightly so, we need a bypass for Galway city which would cost €700 million. When we have done that we then need to put in place a rapid transit system, which would cost another €300 million or €400 million. They are needed because that is what cities do. They gobble up money. If we had €600 million for roads in Connemara we would be fairly well fixed up and the Minister of State would be very happy as the Minister with responsibility for the Gaeltacht. We would not have any infrastructural problems. Not only that, but the infrastructure we would build would be sufficient for 20, 30 or 40 years. The reality is the centre always sucks in the wealth. If we walk around London, and I suggest people do and look at the magnificent buildings, and ask how were they built the answer is it sucked in the wealth from the empire. I do not blame it because that is what centres always do. The centre of power will attract the money particularly when it has the democratic mandate to do so, as it would in the case of the Bill.

I do not like living on people's goodwill. I am suspicious of it in the long term. Therefore, what I would say is fix the financing. Galway has purposely been treated very badly in terms of staff and money in recent years. There has been a policy in the Custom House to ensure there was no actual funding. The city is not that well off either, but when the county council came to me and stated it was short of money I tabled endless questions to the Minister of Housing, Planning and Local Government, or whatever iteration of that Department was there at the time, as to how local authorities are funded, how the cash is divvied out, what is the process and what is the formula. It took me question after question to get the formula. The Minister of State, Deputy Kyne, knows we had to have special meetings in Room A. This was two years after I tried to get the formula. All I wanted to know was how it is done. I could not understand it because from my experience of local authorities, those in Leitrim and Donegal were better off than that in Galway and no rational explanation was given for this. Was it based on the population, the topography, the dispersal of the people or the conglomeration of the people? What was it dispersed on? Talk about obfuscation. The only conclusion I could come to was the formula suited because if people are squeezed hard enough they will do what one wants them to do. It is the same with staff. There has been an acting county manager for the past four or five years. As far as I am concerned it should be like a Secretary General whereby the day one walks out somebody else should walk in. The Civil Service manages to do this all of the time. Many of the rest of the senior staff, such as the director of services, are acting. It is the same with the city council. As I said, I believe the squeeze is on.

Let us look at what would happen from an elected member's point of view. Currently, Galway County Council has 39 elected members and the city has 18, giving a total of 57. I am told if there was an amalgamated local authority in time it would reduce to 40 members. Immediately the more peripheral areas with non-expanding populations would find the very thin representation on the ground they have would begin to melt. Then I would pull out that great plan for 2040, the plan that states Galway city will grow by 40,000 people. I do not think the Government will get its wish. It will grow like a melting ice cream within ten and 15 miles of the city.

I do not believe everybody will live in dense houses in city centres but the Government can dream on. I hope I am around in 20 years time for more great planning by the great planners. If the Government wants to do what it wants to do it should bring in a communist state because the only way it will ever get people to do what it wants them to do it is to force them to do it with a communist state. A half-way house is a mess. The Government writes its plan thinking the people will do what it wants them to do but the people will do what they want to do. They will live in the communities they want to live in because that is what they will choose to do. No matter how much the Government plans the other way they will not go there. As I said, dream on.

Within ten or 15 miles of the city there will be an extra 40,000 people. Beyond that we might get small growth but it will be marginal and Government will make sure it is marginal by starving it of the very basic water, broadband and road infrastructure that is badly needed. Take the local electoral area of north Connemara, as it is called, which is really north south-east Connemara without a sliver. We will call it north Connemara for some reason. It is about 40 miles.

I am a bit old fashioned so I will talk about miles. I have spent my life doing a mental arithmetic exercise in this regard. By dividing 40 miles by six, one gets the number of kilometres. The area is approximately 40 miles by 20 miles, which works out to 800 square miles. That is a lot of territory. However, when that contains an offshore island and any amount of bays, peninsulas or whatever, the actual driving distances are much greater.

At the moment, that area has four councillors. I have not had a chance to carry out a detailed extrapolation, but my guess is that in 20 years' time we would be lucky to have two councillors covering the entire area. The chances are they will live in the eastern part of the area. It will be the same thing down in Portumna and in Dunmore. Does the Minister of State really think that two councillors will be able to fight against the great forces gathered around the city in order to get the resources suddenly to go west or east? As they fail to do that, these areas will decline further. They certainly will not grow and the rest will be history.

We need to have a debate on what we are trying to build. Are we trying to build an economy for the sake of doing so and in the interests of our GDP or are we building an economy for the sake of the people and their quality life? We also need to think about the culture. I do not mean the narrow view of language or whatever. Since human beings were created, there have been artists, storytellers and so on. Anybody who ignores the value of the culture of any people ignores something fundamental to human beings. In the modern world, people always want to talk about what they can measure.

During the rod licence controversy, an accusation was made about those who were defending our lakes against the rod licences being imposed, unfortunately, by a Fianna Fáil Government. They accused the opponents of rod licences of being emotional. To accuse someone of being emotional can be a knockout blow. I attended a meeting of our local party organisation and the chairman, a very wise man, a schoolteacher who had been very involved in the anti-rod licence campaign spoke. He gave one of the most effective speeches I ever heard. It was not very long and I will rehearse it. He said:

They accused us of being emotional. Do you know what? We are emotional. But when you think about it we are born out of emotion, we get married for emotional reasons and it is very emotional when we die. Those are the three biggest things in our lives. Who says emotion doesn't count?

He left it at that - point taken. In all of those major decisions in our lives, rationality is completely trumped by the more cerebral considerations.

I will give some amazing and scary evidence of where we are heading. The expert group wrote a second report in which it suggested bringing together the organisations which deal with industry in the region. It referred to IDA Ireland, Enterprise Ireland and so on. We are talking about an area with the strongest Gaeltacht in the entire country. The headquarters of Údarás na Gaeltachta - the industrial authority for all the Gaeltacht regions in the country - is located only five or six miles from Galway city. Did the expert group mention that Údarás na Gaeltachta should be represented at that meeting? No, because that is not what the group is about; it is about the city and its environs. The hinterlands can go to America as far as it is concerned as long as nothing is done in them.

We will be opposing the Bill. Centralisation is not always right. We are becoming a more centralised and controlled society than ever.

Between now and St. Patrick's Day we will see small parishes taking on the best with some winning and some losing. Corofin, six-in-a-row county champions, beat all the city teams and all the teams from the big towns. It will be interesting to see what will happen between a team from the city, which I have to support on Sunday because that club is located in the constituency of Galway West, against St. Thomas's. However, St. Thomas's does not even have a town. These little parishes that play with the best represent the nowhere of the modern Ireland, the ones that do not exist in the spatial strategies. There is something in these rural parishes. I do not know what it is. Perhaps it is the drinking water that produces in small populations so many absolutely incredible sportspeople and community spirit. On Saturday, my club will contest the Connacht club junior final. We won the all-Ireland title in 2012. It will be a big event for an entire community in a way that just does not happen in the big towns and cities. What the Government seems to be saying is that is all very nice and very traditional and very cute, but it just does not really matter in the modern Ireland.

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