Mr. Gabriel O'Connell:

By way of background, County Monaghan Partnership was established in 1996 and evolved in 2008, as part of the cohesion process at that time, into Monaghan Integrated Development. We deliver broadly similar programmes to other groups but the two main programmes we deliver are Leader and SICAP. Unusually for a rural group, we also deliver the local employment service on behalf of the Department of Social Protection, which we find integrates well with our local development company model. We also deliver jobs clubs, Tús, the rural social scheme and a volunteer centre and, being in a Border county, we also assist with the delivery of the PEACE programme. We deal with anything that fits within the local development and social inclusion remit.

The importance of integration in terms of service delivery, particularly in a rural county like Monaghan, which is 70% rural, cannot be over-stated. In 2014, we worked with 3,655 clients. We assisted over 1,500 people into further education and training.

We assisted 505 people into mainstream jobs and 488 into community employment schemes. On small enterprise, I refer mainly to people who are unemployed and who want to start their own businesses or "necessity entrepreneurs", as we call them. We assisted 89 new enterprise start-ups and worked with 162 existing enterprises to help them become sustainable. That is a total of 251 that we worked with. We also do quite a bit of animation work with community groups with 159 groups being supported during the year. That gives the committee an idea. It is about that kind of networking on the ground - pulling groups together, helping small groups look at the possibility of applying for funding and tapping into other funding schemes.

In terms of individuals, linking them to training programmes and jobs is a critical part of what we do. In that context - and before I go into the main part of the presentation - the figure at the very end, figure 1, is something we have put together by way of trying to provide a conceptual view of what we think our local development company does. It is the graphic at the very end of the presentation. Successful rural development must be a mix of these things. We stimulate rural enterprise through our Leader programme and through the back-to-work enterprise allowance scheme run under SICAP. We work with community and voluntary groups and run a volunteer centre to stimulate active citizenship and involvement in community development. We link people into further education training and lifelong learning. County Monaghan has a history of significant levels of early school leaving and getting those people back to lifelong learning is an important part of development. There is then job placement and the work we do on behalf of the Department of Social Protection. Well over 50% of our budget is from programmes delivered on behalf of that Department, a significant part of which is our local employment service which fits in very well with the local development company model. On the graphic, members will see some of the deliverables.

I was asked to discuss the CEDRA recommendations Nos. 1 to 6 and 11 to 13. Recommendations Nos. 1 to 6 are referred to as "foundation recommendations" and these are the ones it is felt must be got right in rural development if the approach is going to work and if the rest of the recommendations are to succeed. Recommendation No. 1 is about preparing a clear and committed rural economic development policy statement. Naturally enough, one starts with a statement. CEDRA's rationale around that cites the complexity of rural policy. It has been written about quite a bit and, since the foundation of the State, the issue of rural areas and equalising development across the country has been a talking point. Local development companies broadly welcome this recommendation, particularly the need for a clear policy statement on an integrated approach to rural economic development. We stress the importance of an integrated approach. We very much agree that there needs to be a policy statement on this and will mention later the new Department and the integrated working group at national level and the importance of that.

Development companies such as ours deliver a broad range of economic and social initiatives. The mix of both is important. Working on the ground with unemployed people and others, we see the importance of doing the mix of social and economic. One does not work without the other and both are necessary in a rural context. However, we find that the funding Departments with which we deal tend to take a single programme view so that when one reports one's outcomes and figures at the end of the year, one reports them on SICAP, Leader and the local employment service, respectively. The Departments do not see the totality of the figures. In fact, some of the figures I have mentioned would probably surprise some of the individual Departments that fund specific measures. As such, the much-discussed interdepartmental working group is really important to get a grip on things so that integration is seen at national level and local level. The core competences of local development companies doing this mix of initiatives that get people into jobs, include them, tackle social exclusion and address unemployment are really important and must be recognised more as a strong policy instrument. A one-stop-shop approach is one way to look at that along with, more formally, looking at local development companies as policy instruments on the ground in terms of delivering more of these programmes.

Recommendation No. 2 relates and refers to the establishment of the policy delivery and co-ordination mechanism, the creation of the ministerial function and the high-level implementation committee, to which I have referred. We very much welcome the new ministerial function. I am delighted to say that the relevant Minister is from our constituency. However, the rural ministerial portfolio may not be ideally configured. We would like to see the function cover SICAP as well as the Leader programme, particularly in light of the fact that they are the two core programmes delivered by rural development companies. Again, the portfolio brief needs to be at a manageable scale. We have some concerns regarding the co-ordination structures, the LCDCs, that have been set up at local level. There was an expectation that a lot of the public money going into community projects would go through the LCDCs but we have not seen that to date. The only moneys going through the LCDCs to date have been from the Leader programme and SICAP. If that forum is to achieve its overall aim and objectives, a lot of the other funding streams must go through there as well so that they can fully consider the co-ordination of all public funds going into rural areas.

Recommendation No. 4 states that the Government and relevant stakeholders should be required to maximise the potential available funding mechanisms to support economic development in rural areas. This is critical. CEDRA's rationale on this relates to the integrated approach and it refers to the importance of maximising the funding into Leader. In fact, it made a recommendation on retaining Leader funding at 10% of the RDP. That has not happened and, in fact, it has ended up at 7% of the RDP. The Exchequer co-funding was set at 38% unlike the rest of the RDP, which is 46%. We think there will be scope to address that imbalance going forward because many Leader companies have suffered significant funding losses. That would be very welcome in rural areas in terms of job creation, etc. A huge opportunity has been missed in the context of the European Social Fund and the partnership application to the EU in that there was no application for the community-led local development, CLLD, method to utilise all the funds - including ERDF, ESF and EAFRD - in an integrated way. Each member state had the opportunity when making its partnership application to Europe to use the CLLD method for community funding. In the Irish case, it was excluded and left purely to the Leader method. There is definitely scope for more integration. The door is still open and it could still be considered. Indeed, our national representative body, the Irish Local Development Network, ILDN, made strong representations for the CLLD method to be applied by member states and a good number of member states have it applied successfully.

I have a general comment to make on the other funding streams going into rural development currently, namely, the rural economic development zones, REDZ, and the towns and villages scheme. We spent a lot of time in rural areas developing a Leader strategy and we put significant effort into public consultation to ask communities what they wanted. That is the Leader method. Shortly after that, we saw significant other funds coming in through REDZ, the towns and villages scheme, etc.

They do not go through the same type of scrutiny, they do not get the same amount of time to consult with local communities, if there is any consultation at all, and they are being delivered in isolation from the Leader programme. At a previous meeting, one of our colleagues referred to possible duplication. Under Leader we have a team for funding towns and villages but a separate new town and village team is coming, with no interlink or collaboration. There is scope for greater use of the delivery mechanism. None of the funding streams is going through the local community development committees as far as we know. If the local community development committee is to be the real co-ordinator of these programmes at local level, all of these funding streams must go through it. There needs to be greater use of implementing bodies such as the local development companies which have the expertise to deliver it.