What about people of west Cork? It is the smaller fishermen who are lying in ruins. There is the larger fleet and the small fishermen.

If he provokes people, he will get a response.

It was a feasibility study. The Deputy should clarify that.

There was an application involving €300,000 from the Minister's Department for a feasibility study on Union Hall. His Department has refused to give that money to the people of west Cork and to Union Hall pier. The Minister himself went down to Union Hall after the Brexit disaster that he played a massive part in and did nothing for them.

He told them to apply for this funding and they did, but he refused to give it to them afterwards. Shame on the Minister and shame on Fianna Fáil. That is what they have done.

A con job.

I wish to raise serious concerns we have about the ambulance service in west Cork. West Cork has four ambulances: one based in Clonakilty; one based in Castletownbere, one based in Bantry General Hospital; and one based in Skibbereen. I am reliably informed that, on most days and from early morning to late at night, the Clonakilty ambulance is in Cork city and county, not in west Cork, where it is supposed to be. The Castletownbere ambulance is in Kerry, tied up all day and night, leaving just two ambulances to cov…

I respect that the Taoiseach may not have to hand all of the information relating to the west Cork ambulance service. I appreciate the Taoiseach's offer that the Minister will engage on this matter. Staffing is an issue. The staff the ambulance service has at the moment are exhausted. Some are walking away. I have spoken to them personally. There were great ambulance staff who just could not cope anymore and just walked away from the whole crisis they see there. There are solutions out there if worked on. I will pu…

This is an important Bill. Anything that relates to the security of post offices is important. The post office sector has gone through quite a lot in recent years, with little Government aid or attention. I see the same in my village, Goleen, which lost the post office few months ago. Only two or three weeks after losing it, the now Taoiseach, Deputy Varadkar, who was a Minister at the time, turned up for a photo in the village and stood outside a post office which was on the verge of being closed. He showed no act…

We all know and recognise that organ and tissue donation is a service that saves lives. It improves lives and has better health benefits, as well as cost benefits. Ireland has the highest rate of donation in the world, at 20.3 donors per million of the population, but there is no doubt but that there has to be an opt-out system. A family must consent to any organ donation. In my view, Ireland has the highest respect for death. This is not bettered anywhere in the world from the moment of death, which is very trauma…

Ireland has experienced a major crisis in its forestry licensing system in recent years. The crisis has been caused by a number of factors but is mainly driven by a lack of support at Government level, including a lack of funding for the regulatory agency responsible for managing the country's forests. A shortage of skilled staff and a backlog of applications for forestry licences has led to long delays in the processing of applications. Many people have been left in limbo as they wait for their licences to be appr…

Hear, hear.

The Cope Foundation runs a residential centre in Carrigbeg, Bandon, that accommodates 13 special needs adults four nights a week but these adults have to return home every Friday evening until Monday evening. In some cases, they are returning home to elderly parents who are finding it very challenging to care for them every weekend. In a growing number of cases, these people have no family to care for them at weekends and they have to go to another Cope Foundation house for the weekend. The simple and very obvious …

The main purpose of the Bill is to establish a new independent statutory authority to be known as the agrifood regulator - the office for fairness and transparency in the agrifood supply chain. The objective of the new office will be to promote the principles of fairness and transparency in the agriculture and marine food supply chain. According to the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, the office will principally do this in the following ways. It will perform a price and market analysis and reporting …

Given the Minister, Deputy Ryan’s speech earlier, he now accepts there will be a drop in numbers in the national herd, something the then Taoiseach, Deputy Micheál Martin, and others promised would never happen. It is another betrayal by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael of the farmers of this country. He said also that farmers must be compensated for this drop in cattle numbers. How does he propose this when farmers in west Cork are being told they must change their practice of slurry spreading for environmental reasons? …

West Cork has a crisis in SouthDoc. We have an ambulance crisis and a mental health crisis, and no one is responsible. The responsibility of the continued crisis is Cork University Hospital, CUH, lies with the Minister of Health, the previous Ministers and the HSE. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have continuously downgraded services at Bantry General Hospital and got away with it. They closed the overnight accident and emergency department in Bantry a few years ago. No matter how many people tried to explain the consequ…

Since being elected to the House, I have always been an advocate for the home help services. I see at first hand the great work they carry out throughout west Cork. I met a large number of home help workers in Clonakilty last week. To say they are frustrated is an understatement. They work long, poorly regulated hours. They aid Clonakilty home help, which serves areas east of Rosscarbery, such as Ardfield and Timoleague, to the Bandon boundary but, for whatever reasons, they are not getting their new contracts. Thi…

No, the HSE.

I too thank People Before Profit for this motion here this morning about driving down the cost of energy. I am not pointing the finger at that group but quite a number of people in this Chamber talk about driving down the cost of energy but at the same time, they will have supported the carbon tax increase that crippled the Irish people in respect of extra costs on their fuel, their home heating oil and on their day-to-day bills. We are living in very difficult times and I know that every chance that we have here i…

The Minister must think my decision to support him or not is a foregone conclusion, as he decided that I would not be one of the Independents to ring for support in the last few days. He should remember the saying of an old wise man in west Cork that what is not worth asking for is not worth getting. Votes of confidence or no confidence are very serious matters, as far as I am concerned. My record in the Dáil since 2016 shows I supported the former Minister, Frances Fitzgerald, the then Minister for Agriculture, Fo…