Martin Kenny
Sligo-Leitrim · Sinn Féin · Ireland
“A debate here for a couple of hours is fine, but I remember being involved in some of the deep talks with people in the early days of the peace process. We sat in rooms and talked about reconciliation. I met Garret FitzGerald on many occasions at the Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation.”
“Of course, we have the areas of natural constraint payments that most farmers on this side of the Border avail of. Unfortunately, those payments are no longer available in the North. Sinn Féin has recommended that the payments should be restored. Farmers need support. Brexit took their support away.”
“I welcome this debate. Such a debate has been needed for quite a long time. The reality is that for many people, the issue of the financial implications of Irish unity has been used as a put-down to try to smother or put a stop to argument and debate. This is a welcome way in which we can open that up.”
“I hope Government will reflect on that and recognise that we need to build a process. There is an energy for reunification among ordinary people the length and breadth of the country. This is about the physical constraints, but is also about identity. Many people who live on this island have a British identity.”
“As the Taoiseach is aware, for many years people with mental health issues have been attending emergency departments in our hospitals. Many of them get very poor outcomes. They experience long delays and end up on trolleys. Sometimes they are referred for short-term stays or to community services, which offer little or no service.”
“I appreciate all that and the farmers forum is a positive advancement on things, but we are back to the problem at the very core of this issue, which is that the chair of Bord Bia has been using imported beef from Brazil as part of his mix to sell product.”
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“Thousands of people are getting the same messages telling them that the power is back, when they are sitting in the dark. Thousands of people are getting messages telling them their power will be back next Wednesday. When Tuesday evening or Wednesday comes, they are told it will be another three or four days. This is going on and on. I have walked around where this forestry is and it will be weeks before people will see their power restored, probably three or four weeks in some cases, because there are hundreds of trees on top of power lines and hundreds of trees on top of those trees. Yet, we do not see any sense of urgency from Government to put in place any kind of emergency response.”
“So many people are so disappointed, disillusioned, annoyed and frustrated with everything that has happened around the response to this storm. I know the workers from the ESB, from the local authorities and from all the other agencies have been doing their best. For example, Leitrim County Council was giving vouchers for food. That was stopped today. Sligo County Council is still doing it. Why is there this absence of co-ordination, absence of joined-up thinking from anywhere? People do not know what is going on. I have no power in my house. This morning we got a text from the ESB network telling us our power was restored last night at 8.57 p.m. If the power was restored last night, I would bloody well know about it. It is not back.”
“The Ministers here last night thanked the Defence Forces. If members of the Defence Forces assisted with this, at least we could split those into two groups and get double the amount of work done. Nothing is happening for so many people out there. We are talking about a programme for Government but as far as I can see it is a programme for disaster that this Government is presiding over. We need urgent action. We need to get the Defence Forces on the ground in counties Sligo, Leitrim and Mayo, in these areas that have been so badly affected. We absolutely need to get them now, but it should have happened two weeks ago. It has been totally ignored. We need to see action by the Government in respect of this. If we do not see this action, I do not know where people are going to turn.”
“The Government does not recognise or understand the absolute rage out there because of this in so many communities. The vast majority of the problems are due to afforestation, with power lines going through forestry and trees falling on top of them because the trees are planted 10 m from the lines and they grow 30 m tall. One does not need to be a genius to know they will fall on the lines when the wind comes. Today, there is work being done on mounting for plantations in County Longford where the trees will be 10 m from the lines. In 20 years' time, those trees will fall on the lines. What is happening is preposterous. I have seen six ESB crews going into forestry to try to resolve the situation, pulling wires in and trying to carry equipment in. There was no sign of the Defence Forces.”
“They have not had food at home for days because they do not have power in the house. They have to eat out even though they cannot afford to do that. The Minister for Social Protection introduced the humanitarian assistance scheme whereby people could get some assistance but it is not working. In Carrick-on-Shannon today, there was a queue around the corner of people coming in with forms. The forms were just being taken off them and they were being told someone would get back to them. That is no good to people. The scheme has been an utter failure. It is a reflection of how the Government has failed the people in the west and north west of the country. It is obnoxious and wrong. Many people feel let down and abandoned because of what has happened. They are still like this.”
“I congratulate all of the Ministers on their appointments. We certainly feel there are too many Ministers and we would not like to see the Government's replication of what was there in the past because we have seen many failures in it. As I rise to speak on the programme for Government, it strikes me that, in my part of the world, we have seen everything on which people depend shook to its very core by the storm. Thousands of people are still without power. We still have schools closed and major problems. People are very frustrated. My office is inundated with calls, messages and text messages from all kinds of people who are pulling their hair out. Nobody seems to be listening. We have thousands of people with no power. Elderly people who need equipment at home cannot manage. People have not been able to eat at home.”
“I live approximately 1 km from a village and 200 m from the N4 and the main Sligo to Dublin railway line. I am not in the middle of nowhere and I have no power. People who live in rural areas also deserve to have services. This Government must stand up for those people. We have been sitting around for the two weeks since this storm happened. The whole country is in absolute devastation and the Government refused to come back and sit. It is ridiculous.”
“They put it there so they could take it out and eat it some day. Now that it is gone, they are told it is hard luck. That is simply not good enough. The Defence Forces were mentioned. I have seen no members of the Defence Forces in Leitrim and I have been around a lot of the forests. None of them are doing anything. They could be there. We do not need skilled workers. We need people to pull lines 300 m or 400 m through the forest. We need people to carry tools for the technicians who are going to put up what is necessary. The Defence Forces could do all that work but have not been called out. There is so much we could do. I hear on the radio all the time that one of the causes of this problem is that people living in rural areas are living in the wrong places.”
“We have to recognise that there need to be clear avenues for the power lines to go through so the trees will not bring them down on top of people. There are issues in respect of welfare. Hundreds of people get in touch with my office all the time who have filled in the humanitarian assistance forms but cannot get any response. They only get a pittance of money. Freezers are a big issue. People have lost the contents of their freezers and are told it does not matter because it is not an immediate need. For people who go to their freezer and take out the food to thaw for eating that day, it is an immediate need but they are told they cannot get money for it. There needs to be a rethink about that. The Government needs to recognise that many people live by buying food and having it in their freezer to use. They did not put it there forever.”
“If the total claim is for €800, €900 or €1,000 the person may not put in a claim if he or she was only to get a small bit of it, yet because they have an insurance policy they are entitled to nothing according to the Government. There needs to be some way of looking after these people. The Government has let people down in this situation. I absolutely understand that this storm was unprecedented and the worst we have ever seen but a whole lot of issues were foreseeable. A lot of people, or anyone with a bit of cop on, could tell that power lines going through forests beside trees that were growing 30 m tall were going to be brought down. Anyone would tell you that; we have all seen that. I have been preaching this for years and nobody will listen because all that matters is profit. That is the problem in this country.”
“If we had planning permission for such forestry then the local authorities would at least have some control over what is going on. There is no control whatsoever. On the issue of welfare and the problems out there that have been mentioned, there are farmers with sheds down, roofs are gone and businesses have lost massive amounts of money where whole freezers full of food are gone. They have insurance but under the insurance there are rules, one of which concerns whether it was caused by an overall outage, in which case one gets nothing. Something needs to be done for them. There is also the rule whereby the first €500 of the claim is not paid, for example.”
“I spoke to some of the French people who came over here to assist - and they are all doing tremendous work, as are the ESB people and the people from the local authorities from everywhere - but they said they cannot understand why we have let the trees so close to the power lines. They ask "What is going on in this country?" I know why. It is because profit was the driving force when afforestation was going in and big grants were available. The more land planted the more money one got. Five years ago, when the Dáil sat in the convention centre, I brought forward a Bill that proposed a requirement for planning permission for forestry. It was voted down by practically everybody in the House, bar Sinn Féin. It was voted down and people said "No".”
“The novelty wears off very quickly and it has worn off an awful lot of people. We are healthy and we are fine but there are hundreds of people out there who have children with disabilities in the house, who have very elderly parents in the house, and who simply cannot cope. They feel very much left alone and left aside in all of this. The majority of these problems, perhaps 70% or 80%, are caused by afforestation. Forests have grown up. Where the power lines go through the forests there is supposed to be a 10 m corridor. Trees, however, have grown 30 m tall and one does not need to be a genius to know that when the wind comes they will fall on the lines. There are hundreds of trees on top of power lines. I have seen them and walked through them, and hundreds of trees on top of the trees that are on top of the power lines.”
“When I got up this morning the first thing I had to do was go out and get a five-gallon drum and a drop of petrol to put it in the generator. For the last three days we have had a generator that I borrowed from somebody else when their power came back. The network said the power would be back today but now it is saying that it will be next Sunday before it will be back for the five or six houses around me. This is the case for hundreds and thousands of people across my constituency and the whole north west who are left without power. They continually get these communications telling them that it is going to come back and then it does not. Then it is a couple of days more and they are waiting and hoping it will come back soon. Before we got the generator it was hot water bottles and a Superser heater.”