I beg the Leas-Cheann Comhairle's indulgence for a few seconds. I offer my sincere sympathy to the family of Councillor Joe Carroll, who died in west Cork, I suppose, suddenly enough. It is a huge blow. It is fitting that we are talking about Our Rural Future because he was a man who fought for the rural people. I was on the council with him for two years. I found him to be a gentleman. We might have fought inside it but we were best friends outside it like everybody else. I extend my sympathies to Sheila, Linda and Kieran and to the Carroll family and to the people of west Cork and to his colleagues who are brokenhearted because he was a joyful character to be with and to work with. I am a long time fighting for our rural future policy. I have looked at closures and the damage they do to rural communities. If you look at the closure of a post office, you see the damage that does to the whole town. I know it because I live in a community - Goleen - where we have lost our post office. That meant the local butcher shop went. It had a knock-on effect straightaway because everybody moved to the next town to do business. The bank closed in Schull a number of years ago. That led to the loss of a supermarket there within approximately a year. It has a massive knock-on effect. The supports need to be there. The understanding needs to be there. There are no great supports for the post offices. I was trying to save the Durras post office recently, and I might as well have been talking to the bloody pole because An Post did not care. It did not give a damn. It told me it was doing its best. Then I found out somebody who was trying their best to reopen it was not getting any assistance and was only being bluffed off the same as I was. If there is a real intent on rural-proofing all these sort of things, there is where the Minister needs to start. We solved the problem with the Garda stations. However, the problem we have with Garda stations now is that they are no longer closing but there is nobody in them. It is a clever backdoor system of closing them. In Drimoleague and in a few in west Cork, there is no garda working in them because no gardaí are appointed. If you do not appoint them, they cannot be in them. That also has a knock-on effect in the local community. The pub and the shops are closed and it drains the life out of them. In my own village, I see people coming back from all over the world trying to spend money and trying to rejuvenate the community. It needs the State to make sure they do not lose the likes of the post offices and banks because if they do, this is where you are going to end up. If we look at the fuel protest, there is talk about a division between rural and urban. I do not like the talk about it but statements from a former leader, Leo Varadkar, are not helpful at all. They widened the gap there but we should be bridging that gap. The people of rural Ireland take the hit. That is the bottom line here. If the Government increases the carbon tax in the morning, those who will be hit most are the people who have to drive. They have to use that car. With Local Link, a lot of new services were promised to the people of west Cork, around the Grange area and Timoleague. People do not have any transport services in places, such as Kealkill and Corthna. They have no choice but to get into the car to go shopping, to take their children to school and to go to work in the morning, and they are the people who are hit hardest with fuel increases. The Government is quite happy to slap it on. It is being watched closely now but it usually slaps it on very easily, without thinking of the consequences for certain areas. Certainly, rural Ireland gets a terrible beating with any fuel increase because we have to drive. We have to use our vehicles. There was also a discussion about the wastewater treatment plants. We want towns and villages to grow but the county development plans are a farce. That is what I call them. They are gone. They no longer engage with the people. The councillors no longer have a say as to what goes into a county development plan. It was drifting in in 2014 to 2016, when I was a councillor. Councillors were having to "Yes" to officials and to play along with it. That is where we are today. We even had village nuclei between 2014 and 2016 in west Cork and they removed them the next year. The village nucleus was where there was a shop, a church, a creamery or a pub. You give a certain amount of area around that for building to give people a chance to come and live in that community and to build up that community. Sadly, the council, the Cork one anyway, as I can only talk about that one, ran a mile from that. It is like as if it is scared. It has every kind of policy to block you from getting planning. All the young people begging for planning are finding it almost impossible to get it. They are spending fortunes when they should not be doing that. They should be encouraged. These are the people who will turn things around and who will keep the local community alive. We need that to be understood but, unfortunately, that is not happening. We see the confusion now with the short-term lets. Lord God Almighty, it is as simple as one, two, three. On what the short-term lets are doing for rural communities, people will buy a little drink, they will stay overnight, they will drive around and they will buy food. That is what keeps rural communities alive but I cannot get that into the minds of the Government. They feel short-term lets are enemy of the State but they are not. These short-term lets should not be attacked by local government. We were in the audiovisual room a while ago for a presentation on driving licences and reciprocal licences. People come back from America who had licences in Ireland. They are driving in New York one day but are not allowed to drive in Skibbereen the next day. It is insane. A report has been drafted and put forward and, in fairness, it is a good report. I would appreciate the Government might spend time on that. I could spend a day talking about these issues because they are close to my heart.

Sentiment score: 0.03