Rose Conway Walsh (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I second Senator Gerard P. Craughwell's amendment. I, too, wish everybody a happy and healthy new year and best wishes for 2017. Much has happened since we last met. Of significance to Sinn Féin as a party and the country as a whole is the resignation of our leader in the North, Martin McGuinness. I wish him, Bernie and his family the very best of health and happiness. I hope he will make a full and have a speedy recovery. I thank him for the great work he has done in reaching out to people and communities and showing true leadership when required, including by putting his life on the line on many occasions. I encourage everybody to show the same leadership as he has shown and reach out to other communities to ensure it is a given that there is room for everybody on the island, for every opinion and people of every persuasion. I again thank Martin for all he has done and wish our new leader in the North, Michelle O'Neill, the very best in her new position. She is a fantastic choice. With our party president, Deputy Gerry Adams, she has a huge job of work to do to resist attempts at the destruction of the Good Friday Agreement. I wish her well in her attempts to secure special status for the North within the European Union. I ask the House and the wider Oireachtas to do everything possible to help her to secure this special status to ensure all citizens will be looked after.

I would like to comment on the report presented yesterday on rural development. I welcome any investment in rural Ireland, but I am at a loss to understand what is new in the report. For example, in terms of rural infrastructure and connectivity, the key objectives include high speed broadband provision, improvements to rural transport services and implementation of flood relief measures. These are all measures that have been announced previously. I am sure we will be forgiven in rural Ireland if at this stage we say there is report fatigue. We have had spatial and many other strategies which have never amounted to anything more. It is welcome that the Minister, Deputy Heather Humphreys, will come before the House soon when I look forward to having an indepth discussion with her on the report, but to me it is a regurgitation of a series of actions denounced previously. I know that the Government will spin it as being the first comprehensive cross-departmental report, but that is something of which we should be very ashamed. That the Government has been in office for seven years and only now are all Departments agreeing on a strategy begs the question of what have they been doing up to now. What people in rural Ireland want to see is proper investment. We want the neglect of rural Ireland by this and successive Governments to be addressed once and for all and it will only be done through proper investment.