Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

To be quite honest, it is time for them to live in the real world because it is all a waste of time. The problem is that an illusion is created that something great is being done with FLAGs and other measures being announced. A megastructure has been established to administer the amount of money one would give to a community council. The local GAA club in a tuppence halfpenny parish would turn over €80,000 a year. I am not blaming BIM. It is just that the European Union lives in an El Dorado in throwing crumbs from the rich man's table to rural communities. It is time we went back to tell it to get real and ask how much it would spend on trying to redevelop an urban area. It would run into billions of euro and nobody would blink an eye. We have had the Ballymun regeneration project. We have this thing in our minds that giving €5,000 here and €10,000 there rural people will be happy and that it will solve all of their problems and create plenty of jobs. It has never tried it.