Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am delighted the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Deputy McConalogue, has arrived and the Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte, is also present. I ask him to respond to the questions about the marts. Damage is being done to farmers and to those who want to sell from an economic point of view, but another angle is that it provides a physical outlet for people to go to. Not everyone can attend the mart online because they are not adapted to that or because there is no broadband in many areas. Several mart sites crashed yesterday and the price of cattle fell through the floor.

The Minister might also tell me what is going on with coursing. Licences were pulled on Tuesday evening for coursing. Men and women had been training their animals and had netted the hares. They nurtured the hares, inoculated them and looked after their welfare and they were looking forward to coursing in the big fields, on the plains of Kildare and in the Golden Vale. Coursing clubs in south Tipperary include Newcastle, Knockgraffon, Kilsheelan and Clonmel. I think also of the coursing clubs in east Cork and east Limerick. It is a huge part of their culture, heritage and dúchas. It is good for man and beast. It is good for the children and the adults to see the flora and fauna on the open land. The hares are protected by the National Parks & Wildlife Service. It is a devastating blow to the coursing clubs. Some of them had grounds taken. Some of them did not get their licences this year because of the situation with the rabbits.

There is murky business going on in the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. Certain officials have a vested interest and they are destroying this industry. We should remember that it is a business for many people. Thousands of jobs are involved and millions of euro. This must be sorted out. I plead with the Minister to allow coursing events to go ahead. It is amuigh faoin spéir, where we should all be, out in the fields. That is as far as we can go. We cannot go further than 5 km on the roads. I urge the Minister to listen to what I have said.

Regarding the handling of the Covid crisis by the Minister for Health and the Department of Health, the testing and tracing system has been proven to be a shambles. We see again today that UCD cannot cope with the number of tests. This week I was contacted by a young man in Tipperary, a grandson of the late Deputy Michael Ferris, whom I am sure you knew, a Cheann Comhairle. Shane Ferris works for a company in Cork, Cobots. I have gone to see the robots they have, which can carry out testing. They are doing it in universities in Northern Ireland and in England but the company cannot even get an interview with the HSE. The people in the HSE have their arms around it and they will not let any new people in. The robots can do the tests safely and there is no danger of infection to any personnel. It is amazing. I could not believe it when he mentioned it to me until I saw how it could be done in the yard in front of his house. The company cannot get a meeting. We are working on this now for seven or eight months but there is a blockage. One can talk about procurement, but they do not want it. It is like a reserve for the wild animals of the HSE. It is their ground and nobody can come in as they do not want them. They say they can manage the situation themselves, but they cannot manage it. They have not managed it. It has been an abject failure.

Some 17,000 people offered to Be On Call for Ireland but a minuscule amount of them were taken on. We are told that there are 3,500 new personnel yet there are 200 fewer nurses in the HSE than it had in February. What is going on? Some 640 retired soldiers offered to Be On Call for Ireland but not one of them was taken on, yet we have failures and we have a lack of response. An elite Army team could have been put into the nursing home in Roscommon yesterday or anywhere else there was an outbreak but that did not happen because the HSE is out of control.

I am like a broken record in saying that the former taoisigh, Ahern and Cowen, told me they were disbanding the HSE because it could not be managed. Instead of that we are giving it €1 billion every year, on top of €1 billion for the past seven or eight years and now we are giving it €3.6 billion more. We could give it €20 billion more, but it cannot manage. It is not able to manage, full stop. There is something seriously wrong there.

The Minister of State, Deputy Butler, has left the Chamber but I hope she is listening. We do not have a single mental health bed in Tipperary and money is being put into the old St. Michael's unit now to convert it. The sum of €2 million is being spent but we cannot have any mental health patients there. A neighbour of mine ended his own life at the weekend and he is being buried tomorrow. It is so sad.

He was a young man with three young children. It is happening day in, day out. St. Brigid's Hospital in Carrick-on-Suir, a wonderful institution, has three hospice beds which were bought through fundraising by the community. They were taken over for Covid but they are empty with the lights off. The Government will not give them back even on a limited basis.

Home help is not available. The Government can throw money at the problem but we cannot get the carers. Thousands of people have offered to help but they are frustrated. The Government has lost the propaganda war and the faith of the people. We are supposed to lead the people but one cannot do so with inept institutions. NPHET has professional people but it needs to be revamped. If the model is not working right, one revamps it, puts some business people into it, along with mental health specialists and a wide range of different expertise.

It is not NPHET leading the country but the Government. We have feeble and meagre leadership. There needs to be a changing of the guard. The Taoiseach and the Minister for Health have dropped the ball spectacularly, which is sad. The people answered the call.

Community gardaí, like Sergeant Ray Moloney and Garda Noel Glavin in Cahir, the GAA clubs, the women's clubs and other different organisations got together to set up help lines. They will do it again if they have to. That is the nature of the Irish people, the meitheal spirit. However, the Government is all confused and draconian legislation has been introduced. The Government is depressing the people and leading them into the dark of winter. We will get old time this weekend. It is old time that the Government got things sorted out and showed the leadership people expect. There was an old adage in the Penal days, "where Tipperary leads, Ireland follows". The Government needs to start leading now and showing people hope, vision and a roadmap for the future.

The Government needs to cool it on the media. It needs to turn off RTÉ. We do not want to be bombarded all the time with bad and negative news. It needs to put on a few light-hearted shows and a few comedians. The Government needs to give us a bit of hope.

The Government should allow the people to go back to church to pray, for God's sake. Prayer is a solace for all of us. Many of us believe in God. It is important to allow people to have that. The Government should not be threatening to lock up priests if they go out to do a public mass. That happened in the Penal days. We have a mass rock in Newcastle at which we have mass every year to remember what happened in the Penal days. We are back to those days with €2,500 fine or six months in jail for a priest if he says a public mass. What good is it to say it online if the people cannot receive it in their homes because they do not have broadband or do not have the tools to watch it?

We need a HSE team fit for purpose. Sadly, ours is not.

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