Trevor Ó Clochartaigh (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Cuirim céad fáilte roimh na bhfinnéithe. Tá brón orm go raibh mé ag teacht is ag imeacht ansin, ach bhí gnóthaí Seanaid againn.

I have an interest in the area. I worked as a manager of a partnership company in Connemara, and the Connemara examples typify what has been wrong with the development of the sector during the past ten years. From day one, it has been a smash and grab by the county managers on the Leader funds. For years, they have been eyeing up the Leader money and politicians have rowed in behind them through the alignment and cohesion processes to bring us to where we are. It has been a disaster. It is ironic that the policy is called "putting people first", given that it has done the opposite. It has put it upside-down. The idea of the bottom-up mentality has been lost. Although the local authorities hide behind a committee, they are in control of the funding and dictate where money will be spent. It saves the local authorities money on projects they should have been spending money on but which they cut back on.

It is also very anti-democratic. Some of the decisions mentioned today were not taken by the full committees but by four people who were part of a committee. The irony is that the people who have expertise in rural development were excluded from the decision-making process on the committees given that they had a conflict of interest. It is bonkers. The people who knew most about where the money should be spent, the companies that were best to do it, how many lots there should be in a county, where the funding needed to go and where resources should be doubled up were excluded from the decision making. It is nuts. The people left in the room, in one case in Galway, were four people making a decision that affected everybody in the county. In the case of the islands and the Galway scenario, the Department laid down one set of rules whereby there would be only one lot, and it was the whole county. The companies that played to this agenda and applied under it were penalised for doing what they were asked to do. The Department changed the goalposts in the middle of the evaluation process to exclude a company such as Comhar na nOileán. It is bonkers. It is a disgrace and should be investigated. I have said the islands should be a separate lot from the beginning. It makes complete sense and the committee should recommend it.

Looking at the process over ten years, and taking the example of Rosmuc, where there was Cumas Teo and Pléaráca Teo, which was a community development programme, CDP, we were forced into cohesion with Meitheal Forbartha na Gaeltachta, MFG. MFG was a disgrace. I calculated that €9 million was lost to Gaeltacht communities as a result of the demise and mismanagement of MFG. We are talking about the checks and balances. Where was the Department during the MFG debacle? Where were the checks and balances in that company and in other situations around the country? Other companies have been penalised due to the bad management in some companies. Extra administrative burdens have been imposed on the entire sector rather than working with those which are doing it right and sorting out the basket cases.

I welcome the comments on privatisation of some of the services, which has recently arisen as an issue with us. It is very difficult to get people on community employment, CE, schemes given that under social welfare schemes, a private company is going around snapping up people and taking them away from what would have been CE schemes. This is just the tip of the iceberg, I imagine.

I do not buy into the idea of central oversight with Pobal overseeing it. It does not make sense. One has to devolve and allow local communities to decide what projects they want to bring forward. The system should support them in doing what they want to do. As Senator Rose Conway-Walsh said earlier, our Leader model was lauded as the best in Europe, but we have turned it upside down and probably turned it into one of the worst.

Recently, somebody came to me and said he wanted to establish a packaging company in Connemara. He said he did not want to go to Údarás na Gaeltachta given that there was too much red tape and hassle and it would take too long, as he needed to make a decision quickly. I did a trawl to see if there was any commercial space available outside Údarás na Gaeltachta, and I found one unit which was a garage. Is a lack of commercial space for people who have suitable projects an issue across the rural areas? The elephant in the room in many projects is designations, SSEs and development. How significant an impact do the designations in different areas have on projects the witnesses are trying to help people to promote?

There has always been an element of co-funding of projects. Are there any other thoughts on how we will co-fund? When policy is implemented from the top down, there is no buy-in in the local area. The development of initiatives such as greenways is being stifled because there is no local stakeholder buy-in.

Now that we have a local community development committee-led model, where we do not really have this stakeholder buy-in, how will we overcome this issue? If we have a lovely lake in an area and we want to develop a walkway around it, we need all of the landowners in the area to buy into it. How will we get it if they are not really involved in the process of making decisions?

With regard to energy projects, in Canada they had the type of model discussed, where community co-operatives were allowed to develop. They were given a preferential tariff on the electricity they fed into the grid system. They also got a very cheap connection to the grid when doing community projects. They used tidal, wave and small wind energy projects. Are there any other models out there that we know of like this which could be examined? The Aran Islands would be very successful in the development of alternative energy.

Ba mhaith liom mo thacaíocht iomlán a thabhairt don chás atá Comhar na nOileán ag déanamh gur chóir go mbeadh na hoileáin ar fad faoi Chomhar na nOileán agus faoi chúrsaí Leader. Ní dhéanann an rud atá déanta ciall ar bith.

With regard to the national guidelines, it is crazy that the guideline given for Galway was that there would be one company for the entire county, whereas the similar county of Cork was told it would have three companies. How were these decisions made at national level, that there would be one company in one county and three in another? There does not seem to be any rationale coming forward to explain it.