Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have failed rural Ireland. Along with Independents, they pay lip service to these communities but turn their back on them time and again. That is the reality. There is a real anger out there that has been simmering below the surface. It is an anger that boiled up when the Government abandoned people in the face of the fuel crisis. When people screamed out for help, it turned a deaf ear. However, this did not start this month or even this year. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have been chipping away at rural life for decades. Rural Ireland is being closed down one basic service at a time: banks, post offices, Garda stations, you name it, the basics any community needs to survive. Pick a way to measure it such as wages, infrastructure or opportunities, whatever way you cut it, people in counties like my own of Donegal are being left behind. People do not need to look at statistics; they feel it every day. They feel it when they are talking to their child on Zoom who is in Australia, and when they are walking down the village that gets quieter every year. Last week, the mask clearly slipped last week when the former Fine Gael Taoiseach looked down his nose at rural island, when he accused the hard-working people of rural Ireland of sponging off the State. These are the people who get up in the dark and head out in all weathers to make sure there is food put on his table. Leo Varadkar’s comments need to be a turning point where any doubt is cast aside that the decline of rural Ireland is Government policy. However, let me say, policies and Governments can change and the tide can turn. An Ireland of thriving rural communities is possible where people live, work and build their own homes in their own communities, where we value our family farm and contractors and where young people do not feel there is no future but are enabled to live their lives in the communities where they were born, like the generations before them were able to do, where our Gaeltacht and island communities is thriving. This is not about narrowing people's horizons but broadening them. It is about breathing life into the heart and soul of Ireland, the communities that make up our country. Rural communities, just like any other, deserve to survive and thrive.

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