Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Ceapaim go bhfuil, ach tá an Teachta Pringle faoi bhrú. He is at a meeting but is on his way. I welcome the opportunity to take part of this debate. I am aware Ministers are under pressure. I wish, however, the other Minister was here because I particularly want to come back to public transport and housing in Galway.

The Government did well, initially. It responded well and did the right thing with payments and the various grants and supports that were given. I am on record on that. I am worried, however, that what has happened since is that solidarity is gone and the message going out is slightly different. Excellent language has been used like saying we can never go back to where we were, we must go forward and we must take a new approach. I wish I could believe that and see the actions based on that. The Minister of State would then have my full support because we need transformative action. We cannot go back to the way we were. We need to have a completely different vision. I do not need to give anybody lecture. The Minister of State knows as well as I do that we are facing climate change, a biodiversity catastrophe and a public housing crisis.

I have the privileged life of staying in a hotel and I walk by the Gaiety Theatre, which is closed. However, the real-life drama is outside where, on any given day, eight to ten people are outside asleep in sleeping bags, if they are lucky. That shows the type of economy we have allowed to develop up to now. I agree with Social Justice Ireland which said we must look beyond growth and take a new approach to economic policy that recognises the equal importance of social and environmental issues. We certainly did not do that to date as a society. Governments elected by the majority of people did not do that. Each of us has a responsibility for what has happened in this country but it is time to seize the opportunity and have transformative action. I say that in a week where the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, IFAC, told us that we should borrow and spend. We begged it to tell us that for the past five years. Suddenly, it is telling us now to borrow and spend on public services and housing, and I welcome that. I wish the message would come across, without any manipulation or spin, that this Government is intent on building public housing on public land. I see the spin with regard to Galway. We have a housing task force, although I am not sure what it is doing. I have tried to pursue it and get the minutes. It is, however, tolerating a situation where people have been on a waiting list since 2002 without a hope of getting public housing. That is just one aspect. Parallel to that, we have public land where there are plans to develop housing that is not public housing. I have a serious concern about that.

I also come from a city, and Deputy Farrell is in the Chamber. We learned this week that there are plans to close the one municipal swimming pool. I heard another Sinn Féin Deputy talk about the absence of a pool; we have one. The headline today is that it is in dire danger of closing because of a lack of funding. Can anyone imagine that? We are talking about Monopoly money in this Chamber. We are talking about billions of euro but the city council in Galway, through its management, sees fit to say it has no choice - it looks like it, although it has not been confirmed - to close a public swimming pool at a time where obesity is at an all-time record high. What kind of lack of vision is that? What kind of absence of a process is there that a local authority does not have an open door? Perhaps it does. I do not know where the fault lies with Government. How could we tolerate such a headline? The one public swimming we have and that was closed because of Covid-19 has been reopened for the past number of weeks. I use it on a regular basis. The staff are wonderful, the facility is wonderful and here is the headline. Will the Minister of State even take that much from what I say today? I do not want to give out. I want to be part of the solution. We have a vision for the solution, that is, a sustainable development which will be just and fair and not based on cities. Cities need sustainable development but our towns and villages also need to be developed. Earlier today, I raised the pilot project and the six towns that were picked. I am not sure if the Minister of State is familiar with that. It seemed to be a wonderful idea whereby six towns were picked by the then Minister with responsibility for rural and community development, Deputy Ring. It took an extraordinarily long time to do it from 17 towns when it was conceived. The birth came much later and six towns got up to €100,000 each. I raised it this morning with the Minister. I do not know the cost of it but it looks like a report that analysed the difficulties is simply going to be ignored. That scheme was brought in as an example with the view to escalating it to all other towns in the country that needed it and, of course, the glaring absences were towns from the Gaeltacht. No town from the Gaeltacht featured among those six towns. The former Minister was good and said next time he would look at that. Of course, Deputy Ring is gone and there is a new Minister with responsibility for rural and community development. I do not know what has happened but it looks like that report is going to be shredded. I have a big difficulty with that.

Galway city had a second blow this week in an Tulach, i gcroílár na Gaeltachta arís. Dúradh le 20 fostaithe go raibh deireach lena gcuid oibre. Some 20 employees were let go in Planet Payment which is now known as Fintrax. That is on top of another loss the previous year. There is a trend here and a lack of analysis from the Government regarding the impact of Covid-19 on a local, rural and regional basis. There is a glaring absence here and the regional assembly, for example, which is not an extremely radical organisation, produced a report a few months ago to show that the north west, the west and the north had been disproportionately affected by Covid-19.

When we talk about spending Monopoly money, that is, billions of euro, we must do it in a way that is sustainable and that justifies that level of borrowing. We are building a future that is sustainable and taking seriously the climate emergency we declared following so many initiatives from Kyoto onwards and from the sustainable goals. If we do not do that, it makes a mockery of all the suffering and the mantra that we were all in it together.

I mentioned Galway twice already. I will mention it a third and fourth time because of travel agents and the effect on people in the live events sector, which has been mentioned many times by colleagues here. In terms of the travel agents, again, this issue has been raised often and we have had no response. I understand the aviation sector is in serious trouble but surely a package can be thought up. For example, if we look at Galway, I will mention a travel agency because it is the last existing travel agency there. Fahy Travel has given a fantastic service to everyone in Galway like the other travel agencies that did not last. This one lasted, and when it had no money the staff stayed and worked for very little. Some staff got the pandemic unemployment payment, PUP, and other staff stayed on to give back money to the people who had booked holidays, and so forth. They did that in the spirit of "We are all in this together". All they are asking for is recognition that they are in trouble through no fault of their own and that the Government respond and give targeted responses to the people who are in trouble.

I will finish on a personal note in order to bring this home. We talk about the need for transformative action. On Monday, I sat in my office, as many Deputies do. I will not go into too many details but a woman sat in my office and I did not know what to say. After my fifth year as a Deputy, I am still listening to stories about the absence of proper hours for carers. I am trying to avoid identifying the people but her husband suffers from Alzheimer's disease and senility at a very young age. That family is struggling gallantly with the minimum of hours for which they are supposed to be grateful rather than having it as a right. There is absolutely no respite care. They have struggled through Covid-19. That person should not have to be in my office. We should have a statutory entitlement to home care as a right.

That family is saving the State a fortune. The difficulty is that the family will go under, I imagine, before the person who has the diagnosis of dementia, such is the strain without help.

I ask the Minister of State to work with us. I would be on his side on climate change and public housing, if he made the language mean something. However, when I hear the term "public housing" it is never that; it is always a mixture with the developers. I ask him to work with us and let us have true transformative action.

See this speech in context