Eugene Murphy (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I support the Acting Leader with regard to the Order of Business. I will speak about towns, villages and rural regeneration, an issue that is important to all politicians, especially councillors in every local authority region. We have seen another big investment by the Government today. The Minister for Rural and Community Development, Deputy Humphreys, has made an investment in excess of €27 million in the town and village programme up and down the country. It is good to see that a long-vacant building in Ballinasloe is to be repurposed as a hub and €500,000 will be allocated for the redesign of Arigna, County Roscommon, a little village well known to many which was once a great mining place and where there is now a fantastic mining museum. There is much good news in Galway, Roscommon and every other county today.

Some towns and villages are just not making the mark, however. I do not know whether it is because the local community cannot agree on a project or whether greater engagement is needed with the Department. The town and village programme is a fantastic scheme. It is doing something we have all talked about for years in that it is regenerating towns, bringing more people into them and getting rid of vacancy by repurposing vacant buildings. It would be a travesty if a minority of towns and villages were left behind. We need the communities in towns and villages to come to an agreement on what they would like to be developed in their area. If the Department needs to reach out more to those towns and villages, let it do so because it is very important we use this scheme to its potential and ensure every community gets a share of the moneys available to repurpose its town or village. Before I conclude, I wish to refer to something that is upsetting to everybody, whether they live somewhere urban or somewhere rural. I am cognisant of the fact that we have schoolchildren from Malahide here. However, anybody listening to "Morning Ireland" yesterday could not help but be touched by the story of John Healy from Moneygall, which is on the Tipperary-Offaly border. He spoke about the appalling damage done to his sheep flock. Some 50 of his young sheep - I think they might have been hoggets - were killed. He told the story of heading to work and getting a call from his mother. She told him one of the lambs was in the back garden, which is quite a ways from where the sheep should have been. He rang his two teenage sons and asked them to go up to the field not far from the house to see if the sheep were okay. His sons called him back crying uncontrollably because they discovered that 50 of the sheep had been killed by marauding dogs. Senator Boylan has a Bill relating to dogs on the Order Paper. There was another attack in Kildare. This happens every single year. It must be stopped, both for reasons of animal welfare and because of the heartbreak it brings to the farmers who look after their sheep and lambs. We must do something. I do not have a magic answer, but we must do whatever needs to be done. If we have to ban certain types of dog, then we should do so. I appeal to people who have dogs to ensure that they know where they are and that they are under control.