I am glad to get the opportunity to speak. Planning is hurting a great number of people in our county who cannot get planning to build houses for themselves. It is the Government Planning Regulator who is the cause of this. These people just want planning permission. They will build the house themselves and they will foot the bill, as dear as it is, but they are not getting the planning permission. Voids are the next issue and I have been talking about these for the past six or eight months. In a place called Gneev…

I too thank the Independent Group and especially Deputy Harkin for being honest and truthful in what she said. What is wrong about this is that the Government is being ambivalent about the number of acres. It is not telling us the truth. There is no talk about compensation, and the Government just wants to ram this through. It is hitting the farmers on three fronts with these proposals: on the rewetting, on the culling of the cows and on the nitrates. What it is not talking about at all is what this is going to do …

We are talking about windfall gains in the energy sector and deciding how to divvy out the gains from companies that have made windfall profits. This should not be happening at all because the companies should be charging according to what it costs them to make the electricity and taking only a reasonable profit, yet, as we know, they are making massive profits. The Government is trying to divide out their profits and gains to those whom it thinks it should, but it should go to the people who are paying the bills a…

Not agreed.

The Killarney bypass is one of the road projects that the Government and the Greens have halted in recent days. This bypass has been promised for over 25 years. This road is to go from Farranfore to Lissivigeen and from Lissivigeen to Castlelough and Muckross. All the access roads into Killarney and the town itself are choked on a daily basis. The financial well-being of the county is being jeopardised by this further and reckless delay. Hundreds of housing planning applicants cannot even apply for planning as larg…

While there are traffic jams and queues, there is more carbon being emitted when people are waiting in their cars for a half an hour to go here or there. What is the Government doing?

We were promised this in 2000.

I too thank Radio Kerry. I will not list all the names but I know each and every one of them and thank them from the bottom of my heart for what they are doing for the people of Kerry and indeed the people of west Cork and the surrounding areas. However, we are here to talk about RTÉ. We are talking about taxpayers' money and the licence fee that people pay. I am questioning what they are getting in return for that licence fee. What we see is a rollover of programmes going back 30 or 40 years, apart from TG4, which…

We are expected to believe that the Minister met Siún Ní Raghallaigh on Saturday week last and that she never told the Minister she had asked for the resignation of Dee Forbes. I find it hard to believe because it was under the Minister's watch that Ms Ní Raghallaigh was appointed, last November. We are asked to believe this. Workers who do the nitty gritty work had to take cuts. To put it all in context, people trying to stay in their homes for the last hours and days of their lives are only getting 20 minutes of …

I thank Sinn Féin for tabling this very important motion. I welcome the people from the North, from County Tyrone and elsewhere, who are here to agitate for their road to be improved. In that vein, I will support them if there is a vote. We see in County Kerry what is happening to us, as I outlined earlier, regarding our proposed Killarney bypass. The most recent record of the number of vehicles that passed along that road on any day is-----

Right. I-----

The problem emanates from when the Government decided to give 2:1 funding in favour of public transport rather than our roads infrastructure.

Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael succumbed to the tail wagging the dog, or the Green Party, on this. We do not see much public transport. I do not know what people in the north west see by way of public transport, but we do not see it in Kerry anyway. Rather, we see big, flashy buses in Dublin, double-deckers or whatever, and one or two people at the most inside them. That is where the money is going. It is not going to Kerry to the Killarney bypass or the 673 local improvement schemes that are still on the list in Kerry.…

I thank Deputy Mattie McGrath's office for helping us with this motion. This is Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in action together at the behest of the Green Party. They want us to cull cows, rewet land and reduce production by other means through the nitrates directive. Last year, the Taoiseach at the time, Deputy Micheál Martin, was violent when I asked if the Government was considering reducing the number of or culling cows. The Minister denied it. Here we are today because the Green Party kept the pressure on and ens…

We are talking about culling cows.

Culling cows, for example.

We are polluting no lakes or rivers. We will not let-----

It was us.

What about the cull?

Half of the Minister of State's time is gone.