Michael Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Is that better?

The money for the supervisors is a very important issue because these people have played an integral role in our society and have done so much for small towns and villages and have been treated very badly. I want to know for a fact if these people are going to have their pension rights and entitlements taken care of or not.

When we are talking about prudence, managing finances and budgets, we have to be sure, and I have said this here already today, about what we are doing with money because people are very concerned and worried about this. I welcome the July stimulus in advance but I want it to be spent prudently. The Minister of State has common sense and will understand what I am trying to say here. If one goes back - I am not talking about this Government or the last one but about previous Governments - to the issue of housing, what we are all doing is issuing policy after policy and document after document on how we are going to address this housing crisis or how we are going to address the poor prices farmers will receive for their beef. We are getting bogged down continuously in what I call money evaporating schemes in order to dream up a solution for the problem. For instance, when we are talking about beef, it is the easiest thing in the world to solve because all we need to do is to ensure the factories give the beef producers a proper price for the beef at the end of the day. We need not have conferences to discuss it.

When we need to know how to provide housing for homeless people and people on our housing list, let us go back to what the politicians before us did, and in my case Jackie Healy-Rae who was a Member of the Dáil and Kerry County Council. What was their ambition? What did the Acting Chairman do when he was a member of Tipperary County Council? They fought to ensure fields were bought, machines were sent in, planning permission was got, and houses were built. Those houses were local authority houses forever. That is how problems are tackled.

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