Today is the start of local enterprise week. I pay tribute to Jacqui McNabb and her team in Kildare, who have been doing amazing work, pre-Covid and during Covid, in supporting our local businesses and helping them through this difficult time. Not so Bank of Ireland. We had the devastating news this morning that branches in Kilcullen and Monasterevin are to close in these two vibrant small rural towns, which are on the cusp of really good things. That really goes against what we were speaking about over the last few weeks in regard to reimagining life after Covid, where we will have people at home and not having to travel out of their towns to work. It is a retrograde step. I ask the Leader to ask the Government to step in and try to reverse this decision.

Over the last few weeks, KFM, our local radio station, has been doing an absolutely wonderful job in unearthing the dark stories around the Kildare county home based in Athy. While Kildare did not have a mother and baby home, we now know that 7.5% of those in the Sean Ross mother and baby home came from Kildare. Personally, I know many who were born in Pollardstown.

We know many of our "unfortunate mothers", if I can use that term, were sent to the Athy county home. Local historians Frank Taaffe and Mario Corrigan have done excellent work on those who gave birth and were born there.

This morning as I was coming to Leinster House I listened on the radio to a gripping story from Eddie McEntee, an 80-year-old gentleman who was in the Athy county home and was boarded out, as my colleague said, at the age of six. Listening to what he underwent, man's inhumanity to man and child comes to mind. We need to have an investigation into the other places where children were born and into those forgotten children, as he termed it, not covered by the mother and baby homes commission.

It being local enterprise week, I pay tribute to the Clare local enterprise office, LEO, under the leadership of Mr. Padraic McElwee. It has done great work, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic, in supporting businesses who found they needed to change the way they did business. I encourage anybody in County Clare with a good idea to make contact with the LEO because it gives great assistance to people.

Like others, I am disgusted with the Bank of Ireland announcement this morning. Three branches in County Clare will be closed: Miltown Malbay, Kilkee and Tulla. These are busy areas that require banking services. This is on top of Ulster Bank announcing it was closing its branch network and pulling out of Ireland. The mobile Ulster Bank van, which has given great support to people who live in or come on their holidays to rural County Clare, is also gone. We have a situation where three branches of Bank of Ireland, a branch of Ulster Bank in Ennis and the mobile Ulster Bank are gone.

Like everybody else, I appreciate that technology has moved on and many people are banking online. However, there are a significant number of people in County Clare who are not banking online. There are also people who come to visit County Clare. We are promoting tourism and it is identified as a vehicle that will get us out of recession. However, we cannot provide banking services to people visiting Miltown Malbay, Kilkee and Tulla or give them an infrastructure to come in and change their currencies and do other banking essentials, including witnessing signatures, certifying accounts and opening accounts, which need a physical bank to be available for people to walk into. It is a blow to west Clare, east Clare and rural Ireland. We need the Minister to come to the House and give us his thoughts on what can be done to reverse this appalling situation.