Mr. Justin Larkin:

-----so that can be an issue.

Kildare lost €1.2 million in the re-allocation of funding, in spite of advising the Department at the time of our project. Some of our projects took five years to come to fruition because we were working with communities on large scale capital investment. We had to tell some projects that we no longer had the funding for them because it had gone somewhere else.

With regard to how things will roll out in the current programme, we are in new territory as local development companies. We are now classified as implementing bodies or partners. We are no longer the local action group, LAG, in most cases. New processes had to be created to facilitate applications and there is now almost a two-tier system. One must have an expression of interest submitted before one can go to the application. We have to put that information through the local community development committee, LCDC, and then it goes to Pobal and then to the Department. Quite frankly, the time taken to get Leader funding will increase because of the processes we must go through now.

JobPath is having an impact on Tús, certainly in Kildare. We have been given a four week window now, which is welcome, but we could do with double that. If people are referred by the Department for Tús, we are doing our utmost within the four weeks to ensure we interview them, identify a placement for them and place them. However, that might happen in a third of the cases, so there is an impact. We must acknowledge that JobPath is Government policy. It is what the Government decided to do and we cannot be seen to be negative about it.

I agree absolutely with Deputy Michael Collins's comments on broadband and community involvement. There was a missed opportunity in the new programme on support for community involvement and investment in broadband infrastructure. It is my sense that some of the more rural communities, even under the national broadband plan, will have to wait until the very last moment to access speeds of 30 Mbps, while our European counterparts are already accessing speeds of 100 Mbps and 1 GB.