Joe O'Reilly (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Acting Chair for the recognition of the relevance of this matter to real people and families. I also thank the Cathaoirleach for selecting it to be taken. I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Smyth. It is always great to have him in the Seanad. His answers are always lucid and frank. I recognise the fact that he is here representing my constituency colleague the Minister, Deputy Humphreys.

It is important to put this matter in context. The Minister allocated €40 million, a record allocation, to the local improvement scheme which is really about little byroads, laneways and little roads where real people live - taxpayers, service users, pensioners or whomever– and who want access to the main road. It is about assisting them. The Minister gave €40 million in April, I think. All that combines to €170 million invested in the schemes since 2017. I welcome all of that. However, we must always keep perfecting things. The situation now is that one active farmer, a farmer with a herd number, must live on a laneway, there must be another landowner and, of course, there has to be a residence but the difficulty is that the residence requires one hectare of land around the residence.

Most residences, whether rural or urban, where they are not active farmers, have a half acre around the residence. It is normal. Particularly around the time of a housing crisis it is probably arguable that is enough. I am suggesting that if there is a resident on a laneway with that half acre and their house and there is also an active farmer on that laneway, there is an arguable case, and this is my view, that they should be accepted to the scheme. That is not to say that people who have other accesses who can get out to the main road otherwise, and some of those apply for the scheme, are not naturally entitled to it or where the lane is not effectively in use are not entitled to it. I am talking about a case where there is an active farmer, a householder, with the standard amount of land. When buying a site and building a house, a person could not have anticipated a situation where they would need 1 ha. There is a strong case there that you could have a farmer and a person with 1 ha qualifying for the scheme when they make their local contribution, etc. Obviously, there will be many scenarios where there are two landowners. What I am talking about here will be a small enough number of people.

In many, virtually most, cases, there will be the farmer with the family dwelling on the farm and there will be another landholding. Or there might be a couple of dwellings. Invariably, there are multiple dwellings, multiple farms and there might be a landholder without a farm. My distinguished colleague the Acting Chair, Senator Murphy, will be very familiar with this in County Roscommon, which is no different from County Cavan or the rest of rural Ireland in the context of how this applies. Elected colleagues from around the country have mentioned this matter to me. It is not specifically an issue relating to either Cavan or Roscommon. It is a nationwide issue. This is about improving the lives of people who are left out and they do feel disenfranchised. They feel outside the loop a bit. They live in these rural areas, often in difficult enough circumstances. When people went canvassing recently for the local elections, they discovered this. They can have horrible roads in and the service providers, the nurses, doctors and so on, do not want to come in. There are issues with milk delivery systems. We should make the scheme as accessible as possible, within the law and within reason. Where there is one householder - a valid householder on a proper site - and an active farmer on the land, it should qualify.Obviously, in the vast majority of cases, there will be multiples of both.