Danny Healy-Rae
Kerry · Independent · Ireland
“I am glad to get the opportunity to talk about post offices. First of all, I thank the Minister of State, Deputy Charlie McConalogue, and the Government for giving them financial assistance this year because they do need it. Like every other Member, I appreciate our post office network.”
“People should not be sent elsewhere to bigger towns because there are no longer banks in villages and it is very important for people to meet. Social interaction is so important with people. People are becoming very lonely in rural places because they do not meet as much as they used to at the creamery, the shop or the pub.”
“I thank Sinn Féin for bringing forward this Bill and giving us the chance to discuss the possibility of a united Ireland. Since I was a young fella, all I ever heard was that was what we needed and that we could not stop until it was achieved. There is so much involved in this.”
“We hope that we will retain the post offices because as has been said here, the post office, the school and the GAA club are so vital for retaining the identity of parishes throughout the length and breadth of rural Ireland. We hope we will retain the post offices in Kilgarvan, Kenmare and Glenflesk.”
“We want that for the people of the North of Ireland as well but we must have the conversation as to what will be the story for all the different things. We must be united in this Chamber and the people of the Twenty-Six Counties must, by and large, be in favour of reunification. We need to hear their views.”
“We must be united here in this Chamber for a start, each and every one of us. We cannot be throwing Scud missiles across the Chamber at each other. We need to have a united front. This is a serious business. We need to know where this will lead us.”
The complete record
Every one of 737 lines we hold for Danny Healy-Rae, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 8 of 15.
“He will not be seen until the end of February even though he has private health insurance. He has to go through Christmas in that kind of pain but it is the case with several others. A lot of the time it does not seem to matter that you have private health insurance and it does not seem to benefit the sick person in the way it should. We are short of regular staff in many areas, including in our hospitals, home helps and in all health services. I know a few nurses who have retired. There is a new community hospital due to open in Killarney and they have said they would be available to work a number of hours during the week. Do you know what they got back? It was a letter threatening them that their pensions could be stopped if they did not answer this question about pension abatement.”
“I am glad to get the opportunity to talk on health insurance and few other things because we have a lot of issues. Everyone who can possibly afford it should have health insurance. I welcome any moves by the Department of Health and the Government to put money into private health insurance to help bring down the premiums or the policies, if that is what will follow. I worry whether the insurance companies will take advantage and increase the premiums again because that seems to be what happens following interventions by the Government, in that those kinds of people take advantage. There is a lot of concern among people who have private health insurance when they need attention. I know a man who is suffering with his back, who will not be able to sleep and who will be up all night.”
“I have raised it a couple of times in the past couple of weeks. How do we think as a Government we can keep paying €1.2 billion for asylum seekers or refugees or whatever they are in this country? We are under savage pressure for services in every regard. I am asking that question. How long can the country stand up to this? There are taxpayers out in the morning and late at night working and trying to survive and they are taxed to the hilt. That is the question I am asking. I hope someone will address it for me. It is a serious problem. We need to come to grips with it because we must see after our own people too.”
“How much longer does the Minister of State think Ireland can pay over €1 billion per year to accommodate Ukrainian refugees? The other question, which I have asked several times, is: if we can give €600 to assist Ukrainians to pay their rent, can we give it to Irish people as well?”
“We are depending on this Government and the Minister and Ministers of State for agriculture to get out there and make bloody sure that we are not accepting Mercosur. I know what it means. I know what it will mean to the farmers. As well, there is a problem with our poultry at the present time. Someone can export turkey or chicken in here. That is not fair. That is not what we were told at the very beginning. I am very disappointed with the MEPs we elected in Europe. They have not been standing up to the European Parliament in this fight about Mercosur.”
“They are doing what they are doing down in South America and if they can export beef in here against Irish farmers, that is not right and I will not stand for it any day of the week. I am a farmer and have been for the past 40 or 50 years. My three sons are farming. I am still farming myself. I depend on farmers. A big part of the vote I got in County Kerry was from the farming organisations along with a lot of others. I really depend on the farmers. I look up to them. I know what they go through in the middle of the night when they are trying to calve a cow. I know what is involved day to day. When you beat everything else, you still have to contend with the weather. I know what each and every one of them goes through because I went through it myself, as did my father and all belonging to me.”
“I am glad to get the opportunity to talk here tonight on behalf of the motion. I welcome all of the farmers here from around the country. I see people here who were at an IFA meeting in Kilgarvan last night, would you believe? They are up here and they are very welcome. All I have is my word and this Government promised me, going back to the start of the year, that it would be against Mercosur. This was one of the four things that I asked. All I have is my word and that is what it said to me, that it was against Mercosur. I would like the Minister to have been stronger here tonight when he was talking about it. I am only hoping, and I am depending on the Government to reject it because it is not fair. We are all under the one sky.”
“I was disappointed when the Minister of State, Deputy Canney, said we are training Ukrainians to make soldiers out of them and we must stand with Ukrainians. We must maintain our neutrality whatever happens. We have no army. The Minister of State talked about us winning the war. Those were his words here. The Taoiseach said Russia must be made accountable. We cannot make it accountable.”
“However, it steadfastly refuses to give €600 per month to our people. That is not fair. I have to fight for our people too, and I make no bones about it. If the Government can give €600 a month tax free for a Ukrainian family, it should be able to do it for Irish people as well. I know what is happening with the housing list in Kerry and I understand very well the number of people who are left behind. If people's earnings go over a threshold of €37,000, they are thrown off the housing list. Another thing at stake here is our neutrality. I remember as a young fella hearing Éamon de Valera on the radio chastising Winston Churchill for trying to get us into the Second World War. He gave him his answer. We should keep that neutrality.”
“We come in here day after day asking the Government for different things and pleading for our own needy people, whether the elderly, people in hospitals, children or whatever, and invariably we are told we do not have the money for different things. I cannot see how we can sustain this level of spending. Unless the Government can explain otherwise, that it has a separate fund or whatever, I cannot see how we are going to sustain spending that kind of money. Of course, we have a housing crisis here. At the start of the war the Government decided to pay towards accommodation for Ukrainians. It started with €800 tax free but it is now €600. I do not mind if the Government does the same for our people who were brought up here, are trying to live here and continue to stay here.”
“I am glad to get the opportunity to talk on this very important matter this evening. I, like everyone else, commiserate with the people of Ukraine who have gone through so much. What is going on is terrible as is the length of time it has been going on. We have to recognise that Ireland has played a major part in welcoming, as was said previously, up to 120,000 people from Ukraine. Of course, I welcome people who are working here, are in employment here and can stand on their own two feet here. However, when we read the headlines in the newspaper today, we see that Ireland paid over €1 billion last year and several billions for the past three or four years.”
“They see their friends in Killarney, Kenmare or wherever for the weekend. They can go where they like but if you are a farmer's son or daughter, you must traverse the hills, glens and valleys to mind the sheep and feed them or else they will not produce lambs. It is not easy to fool anyone but do not try to fool the farmers because this is what has happened here, and I am in the middle of it. I went home with the message that the payments would not be cut but now I have been told they have been cut. The Minister of State is reading some different stories from the year before or whatever. I am not blaming her one bit in the world. I know she will take my story to the senior Minister. This is a serious issue and the farmers will have to be looked after.”
“I cannot believe that so many farmers would be wrong in highlighting this to me. There is some discrepancy. The Minister of State might be going back further to when they were only getting €8 but they got €13 last year. We were hoping that would increase this year. Instead, when the budget came, we were told that we should be glad it was not reduced but it did not go up either. We were disappointed but we are more disappointed now. I went back and told the farmers in Kerry that there was no cut to the scheme but they are telling me now that there is. It is in Agriland and every paper in Kerry. That is why I am here raising this. We have to say to this Government, and I have been saying it every day, that we have to be careful of young farmers because they are seeing this thing of a work-life balance.”
“I thank the Minister of State for her reply. I know it is late at night. However, I am looking at my documents here and listening to her reading her documents and I make out that we are in two different worlds altogether and talking about two different things. The sheep farmers were expecting €13 and they are getting €11.50. The beef and calf farmers were expecting €75 and they are getting €67. The Minister of State has a different story altogether and she is talking about different times and different things, but the fact of the matter is that these schemes are cut by almost €6 million. Where the €6 million is gone I do not know. Sheep farmers are furious. The ISCA Ireland is saying that payment rate for 2025 is being cut from €75 per calf to €67 per calf. One of is right and one of us is wrong.”
“I got a land the other night in the agriculture committee when two people from the Department came in. The discussion was about anaerobic digesters. These are commercial things that are placed in towns. It came out of one of the witnesses that there would be grants of up to €5 million for an individual person who would build one of these anaerobic digesters. This is about satisfying the 2030 Paris Agreement targets, whereby Ireland would be supplying its own natural gas. This is part of this. Think of that - the whole country loses €5 million to just one person. Is it somewhere like that the money has gone all of a sudden?”
“We must remunerate and reward these farmers because if we do not, there will be a serious decline. Our hills and valleys will not be grazed and they will go wild and we will have more trouble with fires and all that. These people have been doing a great job over the years. The amount of money per individual calf or ewe is small, but we are talking about a loss of €2.2 million to the sheep farmers and a loss of €3.7 million or so to the calf welfare scheme. That is a loss of almost €6 million in rural communities. That is a lot of money to lose divided among all the farmers. Then it is communities, shopkeepers, hardware suppliers, beef meal suppliers and so on. They are all going to take a hit with this. I am wondering where the hell the money has gone.”
“These are farmers who are producing lambs and calves and they have to be seen after. When we talk about sheep farmers, I think of many fellas and the type of hills they have to travel to collect their sheep to see after them. I think of John Egan, who is now in his mid-70s, and his son Glyn. They fertilised their land with a bucket. They cannot travel it with any kind of mechanical vehicle. They manure the land and they do 600 or 700 acres manually. I think of things like that and the kind of work they go through to keep the lambs alive and to keep their calves alive. It is a really hard job. We are talking about generational renewal and young fellas carrying on where farmers left off. I mentioned work-life balance here today to Deputy Calleary.”
“I wish to discuss the recent cuts in the sheep welfare and beef welfare farm payments which have happened recently. I am very disappointed about this. The farmers I am talking about are seriously disappointed about it. They had asked prior to the budget that the amounts they were to receive would be increased. On budget day we were assured that there would not be an increase but that last year's payment levels would be maintained. I went back with that story to the people who had asked me. I was very disappointed when I learned about a week ago that cuts had taken place and that we were not getting what we were promised or what we believed we were to get. There is a cut from €75 to €67 to the beef or calf welfare scheme and a cut from €13 to €11.50 for a ewe.”
“I ask the Minister of State to put this back on the programme for delivery, because the people have been promised it. We are not in the 1900s now. We are in the 2000s. I ask the Minister of State to look at this favourably because it was in the pipeline and now there is no account in the world of it.”
“They cannot come or go anywhere if they do not have a car, and it costs them the sun, moon and stars to keep it going. There is a thing down in Killarney that we have been told has been wiped off the slate and there is no account of it. The railway station and the bus station are side by side. We asked for a bridge or other connection to link the two stations. Instead of that, when you get out of the train, you have to carry all your bags and baggage down past the Great Southern Hotel, out onto the East Avenue Road and up the street again to get to the bus. Likewise, if you get off the bus, it is totally and absolutely ridiculous to have to walk in the pouring rain - it rains a lot in Kerry. I am sad to say that we get more than our share. We believe we are being wronged there as well.”
“We are told that the money is being put into the retrofitting of houses. The Minister of State should tell that to some old person who has been waiting for two and a half years to get an answer back from the SEAI. It is only a joke. The SEAI must be made accountable. It does not answer the phone to any public representative, be it a Minister, TD or county councillor. It is not answerable to anyone. After two and a half years, the SEAI might come back and say a person will get this or they will not get that or whatever. That is not fair. That is not the way to run a country or a Department. It is very unfair what is happening with that money because it is not doing what it should be doing according to what the Government says it is doing. It is very disingenuous the way we are treating people on the road, young and old.”
“The local authority and the Department are doing their best but, despite all their best efforts, we have inclement weather and rainwater on roads and they are constantly being damaged. Cars are affected and it is harder for them to pass the test. Let us look at what it costs the transport industry to be on the road. Likewise, the cost of testing a lorry or bus is €3,000 or €4,000 to do small things, just to keep them going. You would not make any wonder out of it. The cost of the fuel they must pay each day and tax is driving up the cost of living. Fuel is the main driver of the increase in the cost of living. I have no problem in the world in saying that. Is there any way that the carbon tax could be looked at because diesel, petrol and oil are dear enough without driving the cost up further with the carbon tax?”
“I am glad to see that more people are joining me against it now, although there was no account of them at the very beginning. It is very unfair. Coming up along the road this morning, I saw that fuel at the gas stations has gone up almost to €1.80 per litre and it is over that in many places. There is no need for an extra deterrent in the form of the carbon tax to try to deter people from driving because the fuel is dear enough since the Ukrainian war when it went up and there is no stopping it. It has gone up today and when we are going down tomorrow, it will have gone up again. There is no law or order in it. When the cost of fuel goes up, the cost of ancillary things like batteries and tyres goes up also. The cost of passing the NCT affects every man, woman and child. Some of our roads are not in a great state.”
“At this stage, the only time we got value for the money we paid for insurance was when Seán Quinn was in the market. God be good to him wherever he is because he created competition, and he was wrongly blown out of it because there were too many against what he was able to do. I am sorry about what happened to him because we were able to afford insurance at that time. The carbon tax was brought in to deter people from driving and to use other methods of transport. The remaining Green Party TD had the gall to start talking about the cost of motoring and insurance this evening. He forgot to tell anyone that it was he and his gang who orchestrated the carbon tax. They ensured that it was put in place for ten years by the last Government. At no time was I in favour of carbon tax.”
“I am glad to get the opportunity to speak. I thank Sinn Féin for bringing this motion before us this evening. Motoring costs affect every man, woman and child on the road. Kerry is a very diverse county with three peninsulas, and if you are going anywhere, it is a long journey. People cannot manage without a car because without one, they are marooned. I will start off with the challenges young people face with the cost of driving tests, lessons and all the rest of it. They are doing everything right and then they are being robbed by insurance companies. We are all being robbed by insurance companies. Again, it comes down to the regulator. I do not know if we have a regulator. He is not transparent anyway. He cannot be seen or he has taken no action anywhere.”
“If one of them is calving, God help us, he cannot leave at all until the calf is born, whether that is at 2 a.m., 3 a.m., 5 a.m. or 6 a.m., and he is alone. We need to look at what is happening more closely. The young fellows of today are able to size the work-life balance up for themselves. They will not be sweating or perishing from cold in the middle of the night; they and their friends will be out at a dance or in the Gleneagles or down the town in Killarney in Scotts, the Tatler Jack or wherever. At the same time, poor Johnny will be at home waiting for the cow to calve and there will be no one to give him a hand. These things need to be recognised. It is fine, but it is God's gospel truth that we need to be more careful when it comes to our employers.”
“People will be aware that they have the responsibility of employing lads and trying to keep them going. You are paying the worker because you are ensuring that his family, his children and everyone else is looked after. The responsibility for all of that is on the employer's shoulders. I know what it is. I have been employing people since the very first day. Friday evening comes very quick, and it is all included. Young fellows are looking at each other now. They see the fellow who is going off to college and getting a better job, whether it is for the Department or whomever. He works maybe a half day on a Friday and is home early in the evening. The poor farmer's son cannot go home. He must milk the cows, and the cows will have to be milked on Saturday and on Sunday.”
“I am very worried about it. The employer will finish up paying it all. Will this be run by the State? Is it going to create more work for the employer's accountant? If his wife is at it, there is more red tape involved. There is more work in it and more responsibility. I am worried about it. I am getting it in the neck already from employers that there is no one speaking up for them in this House. Everyone seems to be looked after except the employer. There is a big thing happening now called the work-life balance. It is hitting farmers and everyone else. If you are working five days hard on the road, whether it is plastering, carpentry, mechanics or whatever, there is another day's work in organising the next week, paying the lads, having everything in order and sending out the bills.”
“The week goes very quick, and you must find the money and have it for them. Now, everything seems to be hitting the employer together, like the extra sick days that employees can ring in for. If people are sick, it is grand to cover them. It is going to be seven days now, I think, this year. Then there are extra bank holidays. It is the employer who must pay for all of that. It is grand for the State to announce a rise in the minimum wage, but it is the employer who is paying it. When that goes up, all the other wages have to go up. I am concerned about the fact that the State is not paying in at the same level. It is the employer who will finish up paying the 6% himself if he has the employee for ten years, and he will be paying the employees as well. The State will still only pay 0.5%. I do not think there is any great deal in that.”
“I refer to the fellow with two or three fellows working for him, going off in a van to a plastering job, to lay blocks, hauling goods, carpentry or whatever. The man who is employing three or four is very worried about the cost of this. The Minister is saying that the employer will pay 1.5%, the employee will pay 1.5%, and the State will pay just 0.5%. After three years, it will go up for the employee and the employer to 3%. After that, it will go up year on year. After ten years, the employer will have to pay 6%. The truth of it is that the employer will finish up paying for it because otherwise he will lose his employees. That is how they will feel. I have been a small employer for many years. Friday evening often came very quick for me because I was always employing four or five or seven or eight people.”
“It would be a very laudable thing for the Department to consider, the fact that they are getting this payment and it wipes them off the housing list. It is very unfair. I have a man with a wife and three children. They are out in the cold. They are off the housing list. They have no hope in the world of ever buying a house. The way things are going in Killarney, people cannot rent houses. It is costing up to €2,000 a month for a four-bed house, and people cannot afford that. On auto-enrolment, I am concerned about it. I will be honest and say that I do not know enough about it. A lot of people are like me in that they do not understand it. Small employers are the backbone of our economy.”
“The living alone allowance needs to be addressed because people who live alone have the same costs in the house. When there is an elderly couple living together they can share the costs and they have two pensions. They have nothing other than their pensions. That is how many of them survive day to day, but the person living alone is suffering. Some people got an increase in the working family payment that will push them off the housing list. I have so much of this in Kerry. I had a family who were on the housing list for nine years. The family income supplement should be disregarded as income. If a family qualifies for the family income supplement, they are in a bad way. They would not get it only for they need it.”
“The costs of electricity are increasing, in some cases by 17% and in some by 13%, with no uniform amount. There is no reasonable excuse being given for the cost of the rising electricity prices. People have been advised for carbon emissions and whatever – which is something that I do not subscribe to – and they have taken advice and gone with these under the floor heat systems and all that. They are afraid to put a sod of turf into the fire. The honest truth is that since Bord na Móna was closed down, the cost of electricity has gone up every whole day. I regret that very much because there is a carbon footprint bringing gas from wherever it comes and there is a carbon footprint from bringing electricity long distances. We need to look at everything because at the end of the day we are all under the one sky.”
“I am glad to get the opportunity to talk again on this social welfare Bill and auto-enrolment. We are hoping that in a very short time, the means test for carers will be abolished altogether. As I understand it, if you are caring for someone with a disability you are actually living their life. That is what many loved ones are doing. They have no choice in the matter. They do not think about it; they just continue to do that. We must be fair and look after those people as they need it because as a Government and as elected Members, we have to be fair to the people we are representing. Take the rising costs of electricity. People have been forced into using electricity. I have said it here before that the regulator is not visible. He is not being seen at all. People are wondering where he is or what is going on.”
“They are the Ministers of today. They should ensure the energy regulator gets out and does his job, and gives clarification and transparency to what is happening. Are the energy companies entitled to these increases or are they not? I feel they are not.”
“What has happened until now, whether it happens all the time or not, is when the ESB is told about trees rubbing off wires, it is only allowed to cut them back a metre from the lines. That is not good enough. That is not adequate because tall trees fall the length of themselves onto the wires. I ask for that to be reviewed to ensure no tree is left standing. They should not be left standing along any road either because we see people in cars being killed. These trees are overshadowing wires and roads. That should not be happening. I again go back to the exorbitant costs and the regulation, which is not there. It is immaterial. While we support the investment, I do not support what is happening to customers. We do not have a regulator. He is not doing his job. It is the Ministers' duty; this is their time in position.”
“Can you imagine what a €5 million grant would do for people who are trying to pay the electricity costs they have? In the first place, I think I was the only one who voted against the timing for the 2030 emissions target deadline. I was the only one in Dáil Éireann. Every other man, woman, party, Independent and individual voted for 2030. I did not. I know a lot of people will get hurt and squeezed in between. I mentioned retrofitting new and occupied houses against the wishes of tenants. I go back to the way people are being forced and encouraged to use electricity. When we realise that the power can go out at any time, we hope that the ESB and Ministers are ensuring that we will not have outages like we had before, when trees were left too close to wires.”
“Hundreds of people have been on to me that their power is being turned off and that they cannot pay the bills. This is what they find when they have these heat pumps that are running all the year round. They were able to carry on themselves and get a few bags of turf or a bag of coal. We appreciate the fuel allowance, but it is not going as far as people need it to go with these exorbitant electricity bills. I was amazed, when it was made known at the agricultural committee meeting last week, that some of these people who are building commercial anaerobic digesters can get a grant of up to €5 million from the State. Imagine that. What this is about is meeting our 2030 targets for generation of energy. This is being paid for by taxpayers. It is everything and anything just to meet our targets, regardless of what it will cost.”
“I had an elderly lady bawling crying on the phone to ask Kerry County Council not to take out her little stove. That is what is happening. There are vacant houses around the place that are not being got ready for reuse or to leave other tenants into them, and they have no place to live at the present time. Many farmers and others are generating electricity themselves. They were encouraged to produce enough that they could sell it and now we find the grid is only going the one way, bringing electricity to them. The infrastructure is not there to sell the electricity to the ESB. The ESB, in some cases, will only take one third of what they can produce. There is something wrong here and I ask the Minister of State to look at that. It is very serious.”
“They have to have the lowest BER rating and to do that means they cannot have a chimney with an open fireplace or whatever form of heating they desire. This is why they have been forced into electricity only. The Government then will find that when the power goes out, there is no one to help them. Two council houses that I pass every morning when I leave Kilgarvan have been unoccupied for over a year. There was people living in them up until then. The reason is they were selected for complete retrofitting at a cost of over €100,000. There was nothing wrong with the houses only to paint them up and do a few jobs to them, not to take off the roofs and take out the chimneys which is what is happening. They are gone at 18 occupied houses over in Rathmore now, trying to force people into taking out their little stoves and fireplaces.”
“Flogas's increase is just half what the others are. There is no law or order, or control, at all here. Pinergy had an increase of 9.83%. Do we have a regulator? Where is he? Did he ever open his mouth? Is he asleep all the time? What is happening the regulator or is he there at all? That is what I am asking. This is the only sector where companies seem to get what increases they want and the poor consumers have to suffer these massive charges. Many people are cajoled and forced into this situation that they have to use so much electricity. They were told to do this. The building energy rating, BER, rating was forced upon thousands of people that have built new houses by the banks and other lending institutions.”
“If they had the facility of having a drone to go out, check the line and see where it was broken down, it would have saved hours, days and weeks of time for those poor men working hard on the ground trying to rectify the situation. I want the Minister of State to ask why that did not happen in Kerry and why drones were not made available to the crews on the ground. That is one of the questions. The other problem I have is that we hear this massive sum being invested in the ESB, but what are we doing for our consumers that have to pay so much? I see here a list. Energia imposed a 12.1% increase from 9 October last. Bord Gáis raised its electricity unit rates by 13.5% and its standing charges by 12%. SSE Airtricity prices rose 9.5% and those of Flogas 7%. Why is there such a difference in the first place?”
“I am glad to get the chance to talk about this serious and, for some people, emotive matter here this evening. I welcome the investment by Government in the ESB. It surely needs to improve when we see communities left without electricity for days and weeks in places such as Cordal, Brosna, Gneeveguilla, Glencar and Knocknagoshel earlier in the year because of a storm. I have to mention one aspect of that operation. I want to thank all the workers that put their lives in danger trying to restore the lines, day and night, to get the power going. I have to commend them very highly. ESB management, who were overseeing this and ensuring the workers were out there, refused to make drones available to them to find the outages in dense forestry and terrain that was hardly traversable.”
“We must remember the people who are braving the elements on the western seaboard and trying to eke out a living. We have to see after them as well.”
“Fishing did keep those people traditionally in business and kept the local shop and pub going. It is not just the fisherman; it is whole communities that depend on and take pride in their fishermen. We are losing that. I am asking the Ministers to fight harder for quotas and get what rightfully belongs to us. We seem to have left a lot of it slip under successive Governments. I am not blaming the two Ministers but this is their time to get into action and make a mark for themselves and ensure they get the respect we need them to get for the fishing and coastal communities. They are very important to us. We seem to have a shortage of housing everywhere but the biggest cry is here in Dublin. We need to spread out and diversify and have enough people living in the rural parts of Ireland as well. It cannot be all about Dublin.”
“That is when they were out at their best because they seemed to get the fish in those conditions. We need to address that. We have been promised for so long. There are so many people along Tuosist and back the way to Ardgroom and back to Berehaven and there is concern about that. People around Kilmakillogue are always mentioning it. The one thing I have pride in is that these fish lorries go up through Kilgarvan village late at night getting fuel. We liked to see them passing. They would go back empty and go up full. There is not as many of them now. Why is that? We have lost our quotas, I am told. We need to ensure the continuation of the people in the rural communities down along the Iveragh peninsula and all the way around to Dingle. We need to retain the coastal communities and keep them going.”
“There are serious concerns as well as we are losing our quotas to pair trawling in Kenmare Bay. When is that going to be addressed and fair play meted out? The larger trawlers are coming in and cleaning the whole thing out, every kind of fish. I am blaming that for the fact that I cannot get a mackerel or the people of Kilgarvan or anyone else around us. Where are they going? It is not fair. No one person should own anything like that and no large entity should be able to clean out a place like that. All I am asking for is fair play. I do not want to put those people out of business either but we have to see after the smaller people, the Joe Jims who are now dead and Donal Shea who braved the elements. They always said the fishing was better on the bad day when the wind and rain were blowing.”
“We saw the orderly fashion they came in, so many of them, and made their presentation. Each and every one of them was hurting and I always think of them for the meticulous way they made their presentation. There was no repetition. Each of them had their own amount to say and said it eloquently. We have not done enough for them. We need to. There is one thing that I know anyway. I have not seen or tasted a mackerel for almost three years. Like all of us, I was very fond of them. They are not to be seen any more. Where are they gone? I do not know. I remember even people from Kilgarvan used to go back down to Valentia and fish off the rocks there. We lost one great man there, Ned Carey, from Coollick in Kilcummin. It was such a thing at the time but I am told there is no mackerel to be had now.”
“I am glad to get an opportunity to talk on behalf of the fishing industry and coastal communities in general. When fishermen cannot make money, coastal communities are adversely affected. We have to give credit to the British going back to the 1600s. They built up the fishing industry in Ireland and gave the local people at the time the wherewithal to get the fishing industry going, which we carried on through thick and thin for many years. Since our accession to the EU, we have lost much of our fishing quotas to the detriment of Irish fishermen and the coastal communities that I mentioned. All that has been done for them was to pay some of them. We saw the grand presentations they made to us in front of the national conference centre where the Dáil was sitting during Covid.”
“There is no one as badly off as that. Maybe they are leaving it after them and minding it for someone else. That is a mistake. If they have it at all and if the wait on the public list is too long, they should do it. We all decry having to wait because people should be seen after medically, whatever about anything else. Men have to take it upon themselves to see after themselves first.”