Trevor Ó Clochartaigh (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Céad míle fáilte romhat, Paddy. I believe that I was here when Mr. McGuinness came in to the committee as a newly appointed chairman of the WDC and he was full of vigour and enthusiasm for the position. It is very disappointing that he is no longer the chairman, obviously, but I share in the appreciation that he has spoken so candidly on the issues around the WDC.

I get a sense that this malaise goes back almost ten or 15 years. Consider what happened to community development and rural development when we had a whole process of alignment of the community development programmes, CDPs, with the partnership companies. We then had the cohesion of the partnership companies with the Leader programme companies. We are now seeing the pulling back of control from Leader companies to the local community development committees, LCDCs. I am seeing a trend towards centralisation where the Government Departments are sucking everything back into the centre and I get a sense that it is because they do not trust - or do not want - the local communities to make the decisions for themselves. Many times the Departments use the argument that it is about governance issues, that one cannot trust the people out there in those small little companies, that they are all too different, that they cannot run their own businesses etc. We have seen, however, classic examples of companies that went completely belly up and funds went all over the place and they were supposedly under the governance of the Government Departments. One only has to look at the Gaeltacht areas to see where this happened in a catastrophic manner. I do not buy the argument that local communities could not manage their own affairs. I believe they can but they are not being trusted to do it. Would Mr. McGuinness agree with the analysis that there is a sucking of control straight back in to the centre because the Departments want to control the moneys and tell everybody where it is to be spent? They put on the veneer that it is a bottom-up issue, they tick the EU funding box about the money supposedly being decided at a local level but really the control lies in the Departments and one cannot spend a penny without their permission, ticking their boxes and filling in all their paperwork.