Mr. Ian Dempsey:

We welcome the opportunity to inform the work of the joint committee. Mr. O'Brien and I have worked in local development in west Cork for the past 25 years. It initially started out with the introduction of the Leader programme. We have been around since the early days and know the particular visioning for the Leader programme which arose from the MacSharry CAP reforms. We are likely to take a different approach from our colleagues because our perspective is somewhat different.

Our written statement aims to offer some reflections on what the past 25 years tell us about rural development. It is a policy in which many of these issues need to be addressed. There is a need for strong institutional capacity for organisations. It is important to consider which are the local development companies on the ground, what they represent, what their capability is, their visioning, track record and accountability for public funds, etc. We need to look at the skills and competences of everyone working at local level within companies and the broader stakeholders with whom they engage. Having the necessary skills means that they are multifaceted in their ability to leverage economic opportunities to achieve community development and deliver exceptional outcomes with limited public funds in the overall context of local development.

Every rural area will make an argument for meeting its economic development needs. One matter which needs to be considered is that the opportunity in leveraging optimum economic advantage in any rural area differs. When we talk about supports and strategies to do this, they are not uniform. The solution we seek in west Cork, as distinct from County Donegal or County Offaly, needs to accommodate that thinking. We need place-based transformation agendas. Every rural area is working from a different set of opportunities and there is no one single solution. We waste our time and money in chasing that issue.

In our work in the past 25 years we have worked strongly internationally. One of the reasons for this is the work on which we have delivered, particularly in economic development, has been recognised and lauded internationally in the United States and across Europe. We have worked extensively in that space and there has been much interest in our work in that time. On smart specialisation principles, people will be aware of them in the context of Europe 2020, in terms of exemplary work on place-based branding such as the Fuchsia brand and in the use of technology. We have been working in these spaces for a long time with considerable success. We now find, based on our experience, that our role in rural development will come to an end at the end of this month. We will be working abroad. That tells us a lot about policy in Ireland. We are in a really interesting transition in rural areas. If we look at the policy which informs it, there has not been a White Paper on rural development since 1993. Accordingly, we are without a roadmap in what we are all, collectively and individually, trying to achieve. A White Paper should offer a framework and a coherent policy context for what we are all, collectively, trying to achieve. We look at a policy, under the guise of community-led local development, whereby the Leader programme in rural Dublin, important though it might be, has a budget that is one third higher than it is in somewhere like west Cork. Somebody hides behind a policy context and claims the social, economic and community development needs of Kilternan or St. Margaret's are far in excess of those in a peripheral area such as west Cork which is 200 miles from the capital. Members will be familiar with Brian Ó Nualláin-Flann O'Brien who was an exceptional chronicler of many of the absurdities of Irish life. If he were to look at rural development policy today, he would say, as he did many times before, that it was a fierce pancake.

Some might choose to disagree, but many of the achievements of the past 25 years in the country were achieved in spite of policy and on the backs of people, particularly those working voluntarily, both in community and economic work, at local level. They have been delivered in spite of the absence of a coherent policy. The greater thinking on rural development in Ireland comes from the European Union and its vision of rural development and the Leader programme. Rural development is a far bigger issue than the Leader programme. However, we are entering choppy waters without a map.

It is incredibly timely that the committee has chosen to focus on this issue. Those of us living in rural areas, in particular, will understand the importance of these issues and why we need to do much better than we have before. Rural areas are dynamic and characterised by constant change. All of us, collectively, as practitioners, policymakers, public representatives and agency workers, have to adapt to change and help to shape it.