Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

In fairness, the Government's approach to rural Ireland is not about keeping key services functioning in those towns so that people will come into them and then spend and shop elsewhere, but is, as I stated previously, like a landlord of old, to throw money up in the air and let the peasants tip around the ground and see can they pick up those pennies. That is a culture of dependency. What I am talking about is different. It is about building towns and villages in rural Ireland and regional Ireland that can grow and prosper on their own basis. That is what we need.

We in Aontú have collected hundreds of petitions in Castlepollard and the surrounding area in an effort to reopen it.

The Minister was the first to give out about the banks when they closed the cash machines in areas saying that they should not have done so without negotiation with the local people. Here the Minister is closing this service as a full-time service without negotiation with people. If the Minister even looks at the Castlepollard Local Development group, it has managed to bring back an automated teller machine, ATM, into the area. There is an opportunity to reopen this service in the former Bank of Ireland offices. I would urge the Minister to sit down with the group and make sure that there is a future for that town.

See this speech in context