Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I also acknowledge the Minister's clear commitment to rural Ireland and the enthusiasm he has shown in running his Department. The small, rural parish I live in has a church and a pub. There was a post office but it closed a couple of months ago. There is a football field and a three-teacher school which, unfortunately, will soon become a two-teacher school. This is emblematic of many of the parishes around me. The next parish, Gortletteragh, is pretty much the same, as is the parish of Drumreilly down the road. Where there is no town, there is no focal point.

I concur with Deputy Michael Moynihan. People in high offices somewhere are telling people in rural Ireland that we should not build houses and we should all move into towns. It is as if they come from outer space because they do not understand that Ireland is made up of dispersed rural communities. That is what we have had for generations and we intend to keep it, regardless of what these people may think.

The biggest issue is jobs and people in rural areas being able to find employment and stay in their own area. To be able to build a house in their own area is also vital and rural planning is a big issue in many parts of the country. It is a major issue in County Leitrim. Jobs and enabling people to work in their local area are key. The advantage of rural areas is that people do not expect the kinds of salaries they would need if they lived in one of the cities, certainly Dublin. The place that is least developed has the most potential. That underlies all of this.

Broadband is a serious problem in many areas. Eir has produced a map showing purple areas that signify towns where it will deliver broadband. The lines between the various towns on the Eir map run along roads. I can them running along the telegraph poles and a person who looks out a window at the broadband cable and applies to Eir to have broadband provided in his or her home will be refused and told they do not live in one of the areas marked in purple. Something needs to be done about that. Many people can see the broadband fibre optic cable from their homes, yet they are being refused a connection.

The issue of rural housing is also a serious problem. Many of our small towns and villages have major dereliction and many houses that could be developed. As I told the Minister previously, a new scheme is needed, not a Mickey Mouse one like the previous scheme under which applicants received funding to rent out a property. Those schemes do not work. We need a scheme that has the potential to release capital. The Government must show it has confidence in communities by giving them a scheme under which they would be able to leverage additional funding to build and complete a house. That would make a major difference for many people in rural areas.

Tourism was mentioned, an area that offers major potential in many rural areas. In fairness to the Minister, he mentioned cycle ways, greenways and other initiatives, all of which are vital. However, it is about having tourist attractions that are big enough to attract visitors. People need to have a trail from one point to another to be able to spend one week or two weeks in a region and do not visit for only one day, have a look around and go home again. Facilities are needed, particularly for activity based tourism. Some work is being done on that but much more could be done, including through social enterprise and communities coming together.

The problem with LEADER funding has been caused by the changes made to the programme.

I am certainly not blaming the Minister but those changes were negative. They had a negative impact on rural Ireland and that needs to be said. The more that can be done to push that back, give communities more say and give the people on the ground who are making decisions about their own lives more say in what and how they can spend that money, the better. The Minister mentioned the local improvement, LIS, schemes. That fund was very welcome. There is also a whole lot of small rural culs-de-sac with numbers on them that are not private lanes and they also have a problem in getting funding. There was a community involvement scheme in the past and we need to see more money being put into the likes of that so that it can be done again.

An awful lot of the stuff that happens in small rural areas is done through community employment, CE, schemes, Tús schemes and all of those. While it is not the direct responsibility of the Minister, there needs to be more places on those schemes and less stringent rules around them. If someone is over a certain age he or she can only stay for one or two years. I have people coming to me who are in their early sixties and are not going to get a job anywhere else. They have been brought into JobPath to fill out forms and do CVs to look for jobs that do not exist. Somebody somewhere needs to cop on that the place for those people, the place they want to work and want to be, is back on a CE or Tús scheme. There are also issues about having them properly funded, as well as the issue of ensuring that supervisors get their full entitlements and their proper pension entitlements in the future, which is denied to them up to now. That is a very sore issue for a lot of rural communities because they know that these people are the engines of their rural community and they are being badly treated. That needs to be acknowledged and sorted out.

There is a need to make rural areas places where people do not just want to come and live but where they can have opportunity again. Opportunity is what is missing. We must put the capital and the investment in so that people can see the State believes in them. All of us as we go on in life want our children to do a little bit better than we did. Most people in the part of the country I come from want that as well, but they do not see their children doing better than they did where they live now. They see them going away somewhere else to do better. We need to create a society that allows them to succeed where they live themselves.

The issue of education is very important. Most of our children, particularly those of us from rural Ireland, go to college, do well and succeed, but there are no jobs for graduates back in the rural areas. Jobs for graduates is the key thing. There is no point in bringing in jobs that are on the lower end of the scale when our young people are attaining such high degrees and doing so well and have such ambition. We need to have ambition not just for our children but for the place where we live. To do that will require not just the Minister's Department but all Departments to work together. That is the missing bit.

I acknowledge again that the Minister is a man who wants to get the job done. I was talking recently to a person who told me he had worked with a company that wanted to come to Ireland and the man introduced the company to the IDA. The IDA wanted them to go to Dublin only this particular man got them out of Dublin and out to the region. If he had not had the stubbornness to make that happen, it is Dublin they would be in. That is a problem. Part of it is that as good as this city is, housing is too expensive, rents are too expensive and it is chock-a-block with traffic. There are so many things that need to change in this city. The opportunity is outside of it, yet we continue to put more and more pressure on it.

We believe that the regions can work. I think the Minister believes that as well. He needs to talk to all his colleagues because there is somewhere a vacancy which needs to be filled. People do not understand the opportunity that exists in rural Ireland. More and more people would work remotely, would work from home, would work in hubs, and would love to see small businesses grow, develop and evolve. If we have proper fibre-optic broadband in rural Ireland, people could be at the centre of commerce no matter where they were. That is understood yet it is denied to us. One of the big problems we have, which goes way back, is that Eircom was sold off and we do not have control over that any more. We need a Government that takes charge again, that does not continue to put it out there and say the market will look after it. Unfortunately, when it comes to places that are underdeveloped, the markets let them go further downhill. We need an emphasis that ensures that we develop rural Ireland and that we develop all of it. Rural Ireland is not just the place at the back of the hill. It is also the towns and villages, and some of them are quite big towns. People who live in them might think they are urban but the truth is that most of the economy that is generated around even our larger towns is generated by people who live in the rural areas because agriculture is such a big part of our rural economy.

I commend the Minister on the work he is doing. So much more needs to be done by Government. In the most successful things we have had in this country down the years, if we look at ESB, Bord na Móna, Coillte, any of those things, the State went in and took charge and actually delivered. Later on when they were successful, the State sold them off. We do not need to see that happening again.

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