Joe O'Toole (Independent)

I cannot see it, but I will come back to that. The issue raised by Senator Feighan is important, especially with regard to the type of development such as Lough Key Forest Park. I know the Lough Key area well and that there has been some good development there. I agree with the point made by Senator MacSharry that there should be some responsibility on Departments as opposed to planning authorities. If sections of the Department find it impossible to approve something, they should be required to put forward alternative proposals as to what might be done. This issue is of crucial importance for the future.

At a recent briefing of Members with various rural groups involved in housing and related matters, including some prominent people from the Minister of State's constituency, there was talk about the difficulty of developing rural areas. We must ask ourselves what rural Ireland needs, what is important to it and how we can make it live. It is important that people who want to live all their lives in the area are able to do so. If we had a train every hour from Dublin to the areas in the west I mentioned, a person could attend third level education in Dublin, commute and still live in the west if necessary. This sort of commute happens in most other countries. Commuting time would only take two and a half hours or less, depending on the type of train. If people live in the west during their college years, they are more likely to stay there after they have graduated. It is a hugely important issue.

I welcome the commitment by the Minister for Finance to research and development in education, for example in the institutes of technology and colleges. I complimented him when he spoke on budget day about tying such things together, of which I am in favour. I will make a further point in this regard, which I ask the departmental officials to consider. We need to harness what is available to us. I refer to something that used to drive me to distraction when I was in another job. We have invested a great deal in the intellectual ability of the people of the west, many of whom would like to further develop their intellectual capacity. They are unable to do so because they are too far from the main colleges to study for masters' degrees, etc.

Incredibly bright people throughout the west are running their homes, rearing their families and doing jobs somewhere. Many of them would like to exercise their mental functions to a greater extent. They could do so if there was more access to on-line and distance education. It is a very simple thing to do. It is already happening in Hibernia College, which is based just 200 yards from here, and provides professional courses in various areas. Some 80% of each course is taken by the person in his or her own home. Students have to be away from home for 20% of the course, which most of them can manage. There is a huge possibility of harnessing the intellectual energy and ability of people throughout the BMW region in that way.

I acknowledge the expansion of the former Galway Institute of Technology to become the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, which is something I called for over many years. I remember meeting groups in Castlebar to discuss this issue. I appreciate and acknowledge the fact that the Government finally took on board the need for change. The Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology has been a major success. We need to invest money in such areas.

I would like to mention something the Minister did not mention in his speech, although he has mentioned it at least twice before, once in his Budget Statement. I refer to an extraordinarily restrictive proposal in the OECD report on university and third level education, which was published last year. The report recommended that the right to offer doctorate level degrees should be restricted to the traditional universities and that the institutes of technology should not be involved in them. Many Senators felt that it was an extraordinarily regressive step. They do not notice these kinds of things in the Lower House, but we examine them closely in this House. We felt that this extraordinary proposal made no sense, especially as the institutes of technology are so close to industry.

I have spoken strongly, enthusiastically and energetically about the notion that education does not focus solely on business and economic development, but we should not forget that a huge amount of it does. We should not restrict educational institutions. I was pleased by the Minister's commitment in the budget, which he restated today, to develop the areas of research and development, information technology and the universities in the BMW region. It is magic. It is an example of the kind of synergies and energies to which we need to give direction. It needs to be encouraged by all sides of the House. It was the most important thing in the Minister's speech today.

I would like to link the issue of broadband with the future of our airports. I do not want to discuss privatisation and State ownership, etc. When services go wrong, those who are furthest from the general centre of services are the first to lose out. The further one is from Dublin, the more one suffers if services go backwards. When Senators on all sides of the House participated in a long and genuine debate on the privatisation of Eircom, they felt we should do this, that and the other. It is in the record of the House that I said I did not believe a private sector company would bring broadband to Belmullet. I raised that issue all those years ago. Eircom has been sold four times since then and is apparently about to be put in the hands of Babcock & Brown. I do not believe that company will invest in the BMW region — it would not care if the region never existed. It has nothing to do with the BMW region and has no commitment to it.

I worry that we have gone back to the future with Eircom. We wanted to privatise Telecom Éireann because we were sick and tired of people waiting for telephones. In the 1970s, people offered bribes to have telephones installed, but we are quickly moving in that direction again. People have to wait months for a landline to be installed because nobody wants to do it anymore. I mention that because airports are so important. There are airports in the BMW region in Sligo, Knock and Galway. Galway and Sligo airports need to be developed and Knock Airport needs investment. I do not want them to be privatised or taken out of State hands, not for reasons relating to a philosophy or any kind of "ism" but because if we do so, like we did when we gave Eircom, through four owners, to Babcock & Brown, we will send our airline system back to the days of Alcock and Brown. We should not sell that system or move towards selling it without having a clear understanding of where we are going.

I firmly believe that the infrastructure of our air services is of more crucial importance to the west of Ireland than it is to anywhere else. Whenever I make that point during debates on this issue on the national airwaves, I am asked whether I think Michael O'Leary or British Airways would stop bringing aeroplanes into Ireland if Aer Lingus did not exist. I do not believe so but I think they would not care too much about bringing aeroplanes to Sligo, Knock or Shannon.

I apologise to the Minister of State, Deputy Killeen, for forgetting to mention Shannon Airport when I was listing the airports in the western region. I was taking the reference to Shannon Airport as read. There are more commercial airports in the BMW region than in the southern and eastern region. It is crucially important to the BMW region that its airports are allowed to develop and progress. I have never been to Carrickfin airport in County Donegal, but I should have mentioned it because it is also in need of development.

Four new routes from Galway Airport to continental Europe have been announced this year. It is the first time the airport's authorities have started to shake themselves. A substantial development is taking place at Shannon Airport, where a railway link is needed, as I have said on many previous occasions. Given that the Ennis-Limerick railway line is just three miles from Shannon Airport — I have driven along the route and measured it in my car — why is it not possible to develop a spur line to the airport, thereby making it the first airport in Ireland to have a direct rail service? I would like the officials from the Department of Finance to recognise that when people in counties Kerry, Clare, Limerick, Galway, Sligo and Cork are planning their holidays, they prefer to use routes which originate in their own areas. They will not drive to Dublin because they do not want a holiday that starts in Dublin Airport. It is extraordinary that they prefer to use Cork, Shannon, Galway or Knock airports, or wherever flights are available.

We are celebrating 20 years of Knock Airport. I estimate that almost as many people use that airport every year as used Dublin Airport over 20 years ago, when politicians in Dublin said Knock Airport could never be viable. Looking back, I imagine that is the reality. I ask the officials from the Department of Finance to consider one of the problems in the planning sector, which is that the Department often receives flawed advice. It gets economic advice, rather than marketing advice. It is given the kind of advice given to a former Minister with whom I once argued the case for the extension of the rail network to the west, which is what the Minister, Deputy Cowen, said today that he will do. The presentations made by IBEC and other groups at that time basically involved taking the number of people using the trains over the course of a year and dividing it by the cost of upgrading the network. They asked whether the cost would be worth it, without considering the fact that a better service would attract greater usage. I know it is a difficult factor to take into consideration, but we need to do so.

I feel strongly about an issue that was not mentioned in the Minister's speech, but is of absolute relevance to the BMW region. I refer to the commitment in the Good Friday Agreement to examine European regulations and directives when they are being transposed into Irish law to ensure they are similarly done on both sides of the Border. This matter is causing all sorts of difficulties. I refer, for example, to a food safety directive — I do not have the number of the directive to hand — on the ability of craft butchers and local butchers to supply meat to local hotels, guesthouses and restaurants. The EU has decided that butchers who sell meat not only to people who walk into their shops, but also to restaurants and hotels who in turn sell it on to their customers, are wholesalers. In that case, a new raft of regulation must be dealt with. In order to ensure this measure worked properly, each country in Europe was allowed to make its own decisions for a local interpretation of aspects of certain protocols. I do not expect the Minister of State's advisers to be fully up to date in respect of this matter, as it was not handled by his Department.

However, the United Kingdom has interpreted it in such a way that butchers north of the Border have a significant advantage over their southern counterparts. Consequently, it will be butchers in Enniskillen who will be in a position to make sales to restaurants and hotels in Sligo and south Donegal. How big is the difference? A butcher in the United Kingdom can sell up to 2,000 kg per week to a wholesaler or to another outlet, whereas a butcher in the South can only sell a quarter of that amount. Worse, the amount is also restricted to a percentage of his or her total turnover. This constitutes a serious issue.