Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The first thing I would suggest is that the information requested be provided as if it was a freedom of information, FOI request, without the six weeks that an FOI takes - in other words, using the same criteria that personal information cannot be divulged, etc., but all the information that can be divulged will be divulged. Otherwise, all we would have to do is to put in FOIs to get the information. An FOI, however, often means that one trawls information that nobody is interested in and bits of paper that are irrelevant.

The Minister inherited the greatest mess from what was quite an orderly situation, if I may say so myself. In 2011, the arrangement was quite simple; a company would deliver what is now SICAP, Leader, Tús, the rural social and recreation schemes and all those programmes in each area. It was one company, one area. In that way we created a one stop shop for community-led development in each area. If something had gone awry because there had to have been two bids or due to some arcane EU rules, then I would accept it because it seems that níl bun ná barr - there is no top or bottom - to EU rules in the way they can stop the State doing rational things. None of this mess, however, had anything to do with the EU. It had everything to do with the previous Government which decided to rip up the script that had worked, where everyone was happy, and to bring the LCDCs into the game. It made a hotchpotch of it all.

Nowhere is that more evident than in west Cork and Galway. In Galway, we wound up in the courts in respect of the social inclusion and community activation programme, SICAP. All three companies in Galway wanted the programme to be divided between them, as before - that is, Comhar na nOileán, FORUM Connemara and Galway Rural Development. The latter had no interest in west Galway but, because of a decision to the effect that only one company in the county would deliver SICAP, it was a winner-take-all scenario and that created a problem.

We then moved on to the Leader programme. It is fine to say that the independent process gave rise to a particular answer. Of course, that was the case. Perhaps from the point of commencement to the stage when an answer was obtained, there was utter integrity in the process. I do not know, but I presume so. I also presume that if an investigation took place, it would be found that the independent assessors acted with integrity. Two things are absolutely clear, however. One is that the LCDC, Galway Rural Development and Comhar na nÓileán were under the impression that if they not bid for the entire area, they could not be victorious.

FORUM read matters differently. Even though it was not apparent and everyone said the contrary, FORUM guessed that if it bid for part of the area, it could be successful in that regard and that the other part of the area would be the subject of further bids. Is it not maddening to think that for the main bidders, including the LCDC, there could be such a different interpretation of the same request for tender? If the companies had understood it in the way FORUM understood it - and they were seen as the outliers - each one would have bid for exactly what they had before. Galway Rural Development would have bid for east Galway, Comhar na nÓileán would have bid for the Gaeltacht, and FORUM would have bid for the lán-Ghaeltacht part of Connemara, exactly as before. There would have been no conflict, no argument and everyone would have gone home happy because, presumably, the plan would be up to standard. I understand that both plans passed, but that FORUM's was higher and everyone would have got what they wanted.

Some responsibility must be accepted by the people who put out a tender from a Department - I think it was the Department with responsibility for the environment that put it out to tender initially. That tender was so opaque, nobody understood it. In this case, funnily enough, even though everyone said they were wrong, the only ones who understood it were FORUM.

That leads us on to the debacle in west Cork. What happened there was that Comhar na nÓileán believed that if it wanted to retain the islands of west Cork, it could not bid for them as a stand-alone area. I heard no complaint about it being organised from Aran because they had a local person employed on one of the islands off west Cork. They believed that the only way of getting involved in west Cork was to join the LCDC. I understand that the West Cork Development Company stood aside from the process. As happened in Galway, they put the two at loggerheads. Whereas Comhar na nÓileán did not succeed in Galway - and even missed out on getting the Aran Islands - it actually won in west Cork as part of the LCDC package. Therefore, what it failed to do in Galway, it succeeded in doing in Cork and got a whole lot of territory that it had to take along with the islands because that was part of the package. In that way, west Cork lost out.

This was a recipe to put one company against another. I have no doubt that from the point the tenders were put out, the people who handled it did so according to the bizarre rules. Two things are clear, however. Very bad political decisions were made by the Minister's predecessors in response to this matter. I remember in particular the former Minister, Phil Hogan, who is now a European Commissioner. He messed up the septic tanks, water and the Leader programme. He then hightailed it out of the country and left everybody, including the current Minister, to try to clean it up after him.

With bad political decisions having been made, the tendering process was so ambiguous that some of the best minds in community development, including those employed by the LCDCs in Cork and Galway, could not understand the tender. They misread it and thought they either had to bid for the full area or nothing. It is a mess. From Galway's viewpoint, we have a bizarre situation that the viability of the whole island of Inis Oírr has been put at risk by the Minister's Department. That is because the viability of Comhar na nÓileán's headquarters, which was perfectly sustainable when they had the island and the Gaeltacht of south Connemara for Leader and SICAP, is now undermined. If that most important employer is undermined on Inis Oírr, which is a very small island - but with probably the best population structure, as the stiúrthóir will be able to advise the Minister in terms of figures, population structure and school numbers - one will put the island's viability at risk. This employer provided top-class employment on the island. As we know, when an anchor employer disappears, other employment tends to fade as well.

What is the Minister going to do to compensate the island for the massive mortal blow she has delivered to it? How can she ensure that the company will survive until we get back to a more rational bidding process that would ensure fair answers and the sustainability of one of the finest Irish-speaking islands?