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

Mair a chapaill agus gheobhair féar. The Minister of State is telling us to wait for this great new scheme the Government will introduce whereby everybody will have an absolutely fantastic mobile home, trailer or caravan but that, in the meantime, people should freeze. I do not know if any Minister has ever stayed in a mobile home in the winter. It might be fine for someone in Ballybunion for the summer, but a mobile home is very hard to heat in the winter.

The reality is that it takes an awful lot of time in this State to make simple decisions. I would not mind if there were a significant number of consequences or significant costs involved. The Department's budget is approximately €20 billion per year. It is very hard for people to get their heads around that figure but I will put it in simple terms. It is equivalent to worrying about 50 cent if one has €20,000 in one's pocket. The proportion is the same. Doubling the payment to those living in trailers and mobile homes would cost approximately €500,000, which is not a large sum out of a budget of €20,000 million.

I was fascinated by what the Minister of State said about planning permission. Perhaps in his response, he will address whether, if the local authority does not have planning permission, it disqualifies the residents erecting the halting site from getting the fuel allowance. What justification could the Department have for such a decision?

The reality is that this issue has just been put on the long finger. We seem to spend more time studying the obvious than making decisions. As I said, there will be no big knock-on effect. The Government is just trying to avoid somebody saying Travellers got something. My answer to that is that the Government should look at all the statistics, which point to the fact that there are a lot of things in life Travellers do not have.

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