Paschal Mooney (Fianna Fail)

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire. I thank the Cathaoirleach for allowing me to table this motion and the Minister, Deputy Ó Cuív, for taking the time to respond to it.

I grew up in a mining community and my earliest recollections as a child are of watching very tired old men with blackened faces and mining lamps on their heads disgorging from a number of lorries on the main street of Drumshanbo and then having to find their bicycles to cycle a mile or two home. This was after they had worked underground in what were unacceptable conditions by today's standards, lying on their bellies for more than eight hours as they tried to dig out coal from the Arigna coal mines. It was not until I became a Member of the Seanad that I realised just how difficult life had been for the people concerned.

Other childhood memories are also associated with the mining community in Arigna, or the Connaught coalfields, as it is known, because my late father, Joe Mooney, a former Member of this House, God rest him, was an insurance representative for New Ireland Assurance. There was not a house or cottage in Arigna, or in the Arigna valley and mountains, that I was not in at some stage in my young life. Mainly, it was wives and mothers who insured their husbands and sons and the money was kept in a little jar over the fireplace in order that they would have it. There was not sufficient insurance for many of those workers at the time and we did not have the progressive legislation we do now.

As I grew into adulthood I became aware that not only in Arigna but also in other coal mines in Ballingarry and Laois a very serious medical condition had developed as a result of the many years people spent in mines. Its local name is "black lung" and it affects the lungs of those who work underground for long periods of time. I pay a compliment to one man in particular, because he was the first person to alert me to the lack of acknowledgement by the State agencies of this condition suffered by former miners, and that is former councillor Charlie Hopkins from Arigna. As a former miner, he suffers from this condition. I am sure nobody in the House or beyond could not but have been moved emotionally by the filmed reports that appeared on national television in recent months as this issue has come to a head.

I also compliment former Minister and Deputy, Michael Smith, who in 2007 brought together the disparate forces throughout the country, who are a declining number of people, to lobby the then Minister to acknowledge they had a very serious medical condition that warranted equality of treatment before the law.

That is the background and context in which I raise this issue. I have always found the Minister, Deputy Ó Cuív, in his various portfolios to be the most compassionate and humane of Ministers. He has gone the extra mile on those occasions when it has been required; the most recent example is the restoration of pensions to elderly farm women, mainly in the south of Ireland. I am again before him as a supplicant asking him to right a wrong that has existed for decades among a dwindling number of our citizens who worked very hard all of their lives to care for their children, and worked at a time when there was very little work in this country, and many of their contemporaries had to emigrate and never came back. They are with us and here now, and in some instances they are suffering physically and emotionally, apart from the psychological impact it is having on their families and siblings.

I do not want to over-egg the pudding; the Minister is fully aware of the case that has been made to date by the eminent people to whom I referred. All I am doing is raising it again in the hope that now he has taken over this portfolio he will correct the wrongs of many of his predecessors who, for whatever reason, did not fully acknowledge the medical condition of miners' lung.