Michael Ring (Mayo, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

We talked about greenways earlier. I hope that people such as the Deputy and community groups would work with the local farmers to try to encourage them to make their land available. I do not like the compulsory purchase option but in some cases it might be necessary.

The Deputy is quite correct about the CLÁR programme. In the past, the class two and three roads and even the local improvement scheme, LIS, roads were subsidised by the CLÁR programme. With regard to the LIS roads and the local contribution that was being provided, Kerry County Council must not have been treating the Deputy right because we re-introduced that scheme approximately three years ago when I was a Minister of State in the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport. The council was allowed to use up to 15% of discretionary money from the overall budget it received to give to councillors for LIS roads. It happened in some counties. Some of the county managers or chief executive officers of local authorities did not wish to do it, but the discretionary grant is still there. One can take a percentage of that money and use it for discretionary or LIS roads.

I will conclude on this note. The local authorities have discretionary money. Some of them were very good and used that discretionary money on roads. Some of them used it for travelling all over the world or for other schemes they had when they could have put it into roads. That is something the Deputy might discuss with his colleagues in the county council. The discretionary scheme is in place for the LIS roads so the Deputy should check how much of its discretionary money Kerry County Council put towards the roads.