Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Ceann Comhairle for the extraordinary way in which you have handled the role that you hold. You have upheld the highest of standards. You have been remarkably courteous and very fair in your rulings. The next Dáil will miss you. I have been around for a good while and have seen many cinn comhairle. You have been exceptional in the way you have handled the office.

I have represented an urban community for 44 years now. In my last contribution, I will go back to and talk about my rural roots. I believe rural Ireland is at a moment of fantastic opportunity with the opening up of broadband, renewables, the opportunity for carbon management, the huge asset that is our towns and villages and the new direction coming from the national planning framework to kickstart that. It has been hugely fulfilling for me, in this, my final week, to be able to produce a document on the future of rural Ireland, something that we did with the Fine Gael policy lab. There is a real opportunity that needs to be seized. We need to nurture and enrich some of the phenomenal exemplars of good practice in the community, one of them remarkably led by a former person of this parish, Dr. Jerry Cowley in Mayo. We also need to reimagine the extraordinary assets in our towns and villages and engineer their delivery, as the Housing Commission has said. We need to create scope for more innovative leadership at local level. We need to have more conscious rural targets for electric vehicles and retrofitting.

This is a moment of real opportunity. I hope whoever enters government will take this opportunity to heart and make a shift in the way the State thinks about leadership at a local level, because we are too centralised in the way we think. Every Government Department has to reorient how it regards local government and create new structures that will be more fulfilling for the future.

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