Michael Collins (Cork South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

A number of issues have been raised. I referred to the post offices and, in fairness, the Minister clarified it quite well. I have a worry, however. The Minister spoke about bringing in communities to run post offices. That would be a serious move. Running shops is one thing, but running post offices would be quite a serious move.

The judging of the funding of post offices is on their activity. There is no comparison between a post office in Dublin and a post office in Schull in west Cork. Something must be done to bridge that gap for rural communities. The Minister is trying and working on it, and I appreciate that.

I have seen the benefit of the rural social scheme, RSS, to the local farmer and fisherman. It is under the Department of Social Protection and I urge the Minister to consider seriously trying to bring that scheme under her brief. Deputy Humphreys is the Minister for rural affairs and it is most important that the RSS comes back in under Deputy Humphreys' brief. It is built for rural communities. It is not a community services programme, CSP, community employment, CE, scheme or Tús. It is a supplementary income for low-income farmers and fishermen and it must come under the Minister's brief in the future, if she could work towards that.

The town and village enhancement scheme is a great idea. No doubt it is a fabulous idea. Anything that helps local towns and villages is a fabulous idea. We have seen how rural areas especially have been decimated. The idea of living over the shop must be looked at. We are talking about building houses here and there, and nobody looks at the local town and village. In my local town, there might be facilities to house 250 or 300 people, but there are only 15 people living there. Something needs to be addressed there. It might not always suit people to move from wherever but if one is living in a crammed up hotel, an attractive option might be a town or village that provides a huge school, a community centre etc. That should be looked at.

My only concern is that sometimes the local authorities tend to look at the bigger towns and villages and the smaller ones without strong active community groups tend to fall between two stools. That needs to be looked at in order that every rural community is looked after. I attended a meeting in Macroom some months ago. I was on the radio the next day talking about the meeting where I stated that I met only one car on my one hour and 20 minutes journey from Macroom to the parish of Goleen. It tells me that rural communities are dead. They need a bit of life and maybe this town and village enhancement scheme is the way forward. If it is, let us all work together to see whether we can make that happen.

I have two questions on Leader funds. How much of this €40 million will be used in administration and are there still payments to be made which will come from this €40 million?