Mr. Joseph McCrohan:

My experience from operating the ruling social scheme and the Tús initiative is that while we need to bring along all of the community services that we operate, we also need to move to community enterprise. A good example is Valentia Island Lighthouse, which was opened by the community and had 15,000 visitors this summer. This is a community project staffed by Tús and the rural social scheme working hand in hand.

What is dangerous and very confusing for everybody is to have the Gateway scheme, the rural social scheme and Tús schemes run by different organisations. There are also projects run by the Department of Social Protection itself. Let us hope the 500 new Tús and rural social scheme places are run by parish companies and not by another body coming in, as happened to the local employment service when JobPath came in. JobPath is a very cruel instrument. It tells unemployed people it will get them a job, but people are being sucked out of rural Ireland. They are told they must move on Monday morning. I have an example of a farmer's son who was unemployed and moved from Kerry to Cork Airport because there was a job there. He was probably happy he got a job and we can all see the benefit of this, but this is a commercial company being paid a commercial rate to do this work. We can see unemployed people being sucked out of rural areas rather than jobs being generated in rural areas which unemployed people could take up. I have nothing in the wide earthly world against an unemployed person getting a job, and that is what they should do, but it is a dangerous tool.

With regard to joined up thinking, Mr. Dempsey spoke earlier about Departments needing to join up. The budget is a dangerous instrument in the sense that every Minister looks for a pot of money and everybody works independently. We now have a partnership Government. It is ironic it wants to get rid of some of the partnerships when it is a partnership Government itself. It is important there is joined up thinking. We have a problem in Kerry at present where in one project in Waterville landowners and rural social scheme participants are clearing out the rivers to make fishing beds better for salmon, but across the hill in Glencar and Blackwater the farmers are told by the Department not to clear out the rivers and they are to be left alone. Recently a track machine which was cleaning the drains was asked to leave the side of the road. We know there is a way of doing it, but the officials need to write down the one, two, three, four or five steps that need to be taken when we are looking after river catchments in these designated areas.

Definitely when people's land becomes designated they get a whole lot of problems with it and a whole lot of headaches. There is no other way of saying this. A lady started an enterprise and she had to jump a lot of hoops to put in a proper sewage system for two or three employees in a unit at the back of the house. All of her children, who have gone off to college, had been living in the house, but because there were workers this had to go in. In fairness to the woman, she went through the process and it took a long time, but the people have their jobs now in a veterinary company working in a remote part of south Kerry. It took a great individual to go through the red tape. It was mentioned in the report of the Commission for the Economic Development of Rural Areas, CEDRA, that it will take a lot of strong people to revive rural Ireland. The policies, Government and all of the agencies, including ourselves, must nurture these people, because we are being left with very few people to work with as people emigrate and depopulate and family sizes get smaller, and the ripple effect is serious for rural Ireland.