Barry Cowen (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

My comments are in much the same vein. It is a peculiar sort of exercise.

The county development plan is a service delivery plan which sets outs the aspirations and goals of the local authority, the mechanisms that govern it and the way in which it does business over five or six years. The roads programme in any given year is a service delivery plan, as are the arts programme and the housing programme and the means and mechanisms by which these programmes are implemented are determined by the amount of funding that is made available to the local authority. I hope, therefore, that when the Minister is measuring service delivery plans, he will leave a large space available to examine the lack of available funds to carry out the function for which they were put in place. This should be measured so that responsibility and political accountability can be measured by the public, rather than lay the failure to deliver at the feet of the local authority members. The failure lies at the feet of central government which did not make the funds available to deliver many of the programmes.