Michael Healy-Rae

I thank the Minister of State, Deputy Cummins. for the excellent work he has been doing, in a very practical, down to earth and sensible way, in trying to help the housing situation. By his initiatives and his control of the situation, along with the senior Minister, Deputy Browne, whom I also thank publicly, he is certainly introducing changes that will be felt up and down the length and breadth …

A lurcher.

That is a scurrilous accusation to be making.

It is of course.

It is just because you did not like what he said. He hurt you in what he said, that is all that is wrong with you, because he told the truth.

He told the truth. The truth hurts.

To make it very clear, the Government will 100% oppose this Bill as it is proposed. I will call it out for what it is. It is extremely misleading. I would go so far as to say it is a con job. I will tell the House why. As currently drafted, the Bill proposes to ban all hunting for foxes, regardless of the purpose of that hunting and the manner in which it is carried out. That has been ignored tod…

-----with red coats shouting "Tally-ho". That is rubbish. That is not what this Bill proposes to ban and the people who are saying otherwise obviously have not read it in its entirety. If farmers have lambs outside in a field and want to protect them, this Bill would make them criminals tomorrow if they shot foxes tonight.

That is exactly the legal opinion regarding what is proposed here.

I will make that very clear.

I was not going to talk about Deputy Gogarty at all but, seeing as he is interrupting me, I will say that he completely misled everybody here. He obviously did not read the Bill because he does not know what he is talking about.

If he did, he would not have said what he said. A lot has been said about the 73% of people who say that they do not want this type of fox hunting to continue. There is an important statistic left out of that, which is that 98% of those people said they had never seen a hunt or foxes being killed. They never saw anything. All they are doing is listening to media reports about this. These 73% are t…

The badgers are absolutely a leading contributor to the spread of TB.

Again, this is something the Deputy knows nothing about.

It is scientific fact.

It is a scientific fact but, of course, the other side do not want to hear that because they think the badgers are beautiful. Tell that to a farmer like the good friend of mine who yesterday saw 17 in-calf heifers having to leave his yard because they had contracted TB. Why? It was because of badgers.

We have to eradicate badgers.

We have to eradicate our deer. We have to manage rural Ireland. I have heard people talking about colonial pursuits. Again, they are trying to give the public the message that this is only about people up on horses running after the poor fox. It is not. It is about the poor farmer who has to get up in the middle of the night to try to identify, follow, track and kill a fox because it is killing hi…

What has happened here over the past couple of weeks has been completely misleading. Again, what she is trying to do has been misportrayed. She is attacking rural Ireland. She is attacking our farming community.

The people who are with her are misrepresenting what they are actually trying to do. I am delighted that they will lose the vote tonight and the people who want to continue killing foxes will be entitled to do so.

She will not take away their pursuit.

That is why you object to houses, is it?

And that is why you are an objector.

They can get a grant.

No, I understood-----