Like other Senators, I welcome the Acting Leader to the House. I agree completely with Senators Lynch and Kennelly on the Walk Out for Women and support for rural pubs.

I talk in this House a lot about infrastructure and I criticise Uisce Éireann from time to time with regard to delivery. Across west Cork in the summer months, we saw investment in water infrastructure in Adrigole and Lisavaird. In Ballinascarty and Shannonvale, works commenced yesterday. It is important to put on the record when works are completed and started. We have seen Government investment into our water network, and it is great to see communities being served by these upgrades. Hopefully, water outages will not happen in these communities in the future.

I turn my attention to our roads infrastructure, another issue I talk about a lot in the House. I call for a debate with the Minister for Transport. Cork county has more than 12,000 km of roads. It is the largest county with the largest number of road kilometres in this country. Thankfully, we have seen increased annual funding for our regional and local roads. I welcome the prioritisation of roads funding in budgets again. I am calling for a debate on the discretionary element of this funding. I know that will also be important for the Acting Leader’s county. This is the basic maintenance of our rural and local roads and taking the water off of them. As politicians in these Houses, many will say we should not be talking about local and rural roads, but I am looking for a policy change. This is about saving money for the taxpayers. We need to do more to protect and maintain our roads. You will often hear about the man with the shovel in rural Ireland taking the water off. We need to go back to look at the policy and give discretion to area engineers. It is fine tarring and resurfacing roads, but what happens when the storms and floods come? This is a country that has a lot of rain but we do not maintain and protect our roads. We need a debate with the Minister for Transport to ensure that more discretionary funding is reaching local level. The engineers are brilliant at their jobs, but they do not have discretion to go out to do the maintenance work that they need to do daily.