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

I welcome the people from the fire service who are in the Gallery and were earlier outside the gates of the Dáil. Many of them had to go home because they are on call tonight in their respective counties. I welcome the people who came from County Kerry and the rest of the country. They are here not because they want to be here but because they have to be here. They must make the Minister of State and the Government listen.

When Government leaders and Ministers go on the television after tragedies, the first thing they do is to thank the emergency services. It is the same situation as applied in respect of the nurses when the Government told people around the country to stand up and start clapping for them. That was among the most insulting, degrading things ever done to any sector of society. The same thing has happened to the people who are here tonight. They did not come here to hear us praising them. They did no such thing. They came to seek a thing called fair play and fair pay. It is the same situation as applied in respect of the nurses. Never mind clapping for them; pay them instead. It is the same for the firemen and the retained fire service. Give them proper money to allow them to live the same as everybody else and to have a mortgage the same as everybody else. They should be allowed the same opportunity to send their children to school as everybody else in every other walk of life. Why should they be treated as second-class citizens?

In rural areas, it is a fact that when an ambulance is called out, the local fire service should also be called out. In many instances, the fire service could arrive to a scene quicker than an ambulance because the Government has made a right dog's dinner out of the ambulance service by centralising it to a disused fire station here in Dublin instead of keeping it in the local areas as was the case and where people had knowledge of the local area and its geography. The Government made a mess of that and it will do the same with the fire service if it is allowed to get away with it. We will not allow the Government to get away with it.

I omitted at the start of my contribution to acknowledge the good work done by Sinn Féin. I thank its members for bringing forward this motion.

I pay tribute to the fire service in Kerry, in particular to people such as Mr. Teddy McCarthy, the late Teddy "Chub" O'Connor, who walked the highways with us and who served his time as a chief in the Killorglin fire station. I pay tribute to all the other fire people in County Kerry.

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