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Senator Mark Daly:       I welcome the Minister of State back to the House. The issue of rural transport is important, given the cuts that face the organisations which co-ordinate this throughout the country. The 8% cut in the 2012 budget will no doubt be felt very shortly. It is an imposition the organisations cannot afford at this time.

Rural transport plays an important role in combatting rural isolation. The Minister of State will be well aware of this in his own constituency. The next issue to be debated in this House is suicide and the ever-growing issue of isolated men in rural areas taking their own lives due to the fact that they had no social interaction. That social interaction is provided to some degree by rural transport, but the Government has hit out at rural Ireland on many occasions in the budget so that we need not be too worried about a rural transport system because, soon nobody will be living in rural Ireland to transport.

The Minister for Education and Skills spoke about two and three-teacher schools needing to consider their future, and the pupil-teacher ratio changes that were brought in as a result will be the death knell for some rural schools. If there is no rural school, people will not move to the area. We now have the issue of the septic tank charge, which is currently being debated at the environment committee. It would be harder to construct a more unjust attack, given the fact that people put in the tanks legally, with planning permission granted according to the regulations of the time, yet the Government will not now provide grant aid to those people to bring the septic tanks up to the required standards. It is a more fundamental issue than that, because now we have such standards and planning that there will be no new houses in rural areas that this rural transport system might facilitate. Ultimately, rural Ireland will close down.

We have had a series of unconnected legislation which has the foreseeable outcome of the end of rural Ireland as we know it. We have had drink driving regulations followed by planning regulations and small schools being shut down. If we add that all together, then in 20 years people will do studies on how rural Ireland ended up and why it disappeared. The last budget had an obvious anti-rural bias, with the closure of Garda stations, so people will not feel as safe in rural areas as they should and as they are entitled. I know the Minister of State has been fighting the school transport issue. It is very hard to take on these issues in this economic climate, but increased school transport fees, added to the fear that some schools will be closed down - some parents are making the decision not to send their children to a school they fear will be closed down - all adds to the slow, long process of virtually closing down rural Ireland. I do not think we will be worrying about a rural transport scheme in 20 years, because there will not be too many people to service in rural Ireland. This is what I would like the Minister of State to take from this. I know he is doing his best and he has come to the House on a previous occasion. He has fought hard at parliamentary party and Government level to maintain funding for rural transport. Ultimately, the policy of all Governments, not only this Government but previous ones, shows a lack of joined-up thinking for the obvious and foreseeable outcome of the numerous steps which have been taken and implemented over the past 20 years. This unintended outcome is that fewer people are able to live and raise families in rural Ireland.

The rural transport scheme deals with rural isolation to a degree but, as the Minister of State knows well, people cannot go to the pubs, which have all shut down, and the facilities people took for granted 20 years ago no longer exist. While I welcome the debate on the importance of the rural transport service it is part of a far wider debate on all the cuts, regulations and legislation introduced over the past 20 years which are having a very detrimental effect on rural Ireland. We have plans for spatial strategies and urban areas but we do not seem to have a plan that would allow people to live in rural Ireland and allow rural Ireland to thrive.