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

Ba mhaith liom comhghairdeas a dhéanamh leis an Aire tar éis dó bheith ceaptha mar Aire Forbartha Tuaithe agus Pobail. I would like to congratulate the Minister on his appointment. We all have the good of rural Ireland at heart. As time will be limited, I am going to focus on five general themes and then presumably we will get a chance to go through it subhead by subhead. There are an awful lot of questions here and our job as a committee is to question and to raise the issues that we think are neglected. I do not envy the Minister his task. However, I think overselling his powers could be a dangerous thing. He says that he has a cross-Government mandate. If he truly has, that is hugely important and there is an immediate urgent task on hand. No doubt he has seen the draft national planning framework. It is totally biased against rural communities. Is the Minister willing to engage with this committee to work with us to ensure that planning framework when it is finalised gives fair play to rural communities up and down the country?

Is the Minister willing to engage, hear what we have to say and discuss the submissions we have made regarding that framework? That will be an acid test of what cross-Government mandate he really has.

I have made this third point before and I sincerely believe it. The Department of Rural and Community Development does not have enough functions. A report will be published soon from the previous Joint Committee on Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, and it will propose giving a lot more functions to the Department. I have no doubt that the Minister will be cheering us on, as will his officials, because Departments love to be given functions. However, it seems absolutely ridiculous to have a Minister for Rural and Community Development with a spend of €80 million, out of a total State spend of about €60 billion. The kind of functions that would obviously lie with the Department would be the rural social scheme, farm assist, the community services programme, the community employment scheme, the rural transport programme, etc. We need to return to this topic another day, because the Department just does not have the functions it will need if it is to deliver on its mandate. The Minister of State, Deputy Sean Kyne, spoke fairly quickly, and I could not write everything he said down in time. Could the Minister circulate to each member of the committee a list of the functions that he is retaining, referenced by sub-head. I believe in always following the money. What sub-heads does he have, and what sub-heads does his Minister of State have? Can he confirm that delegated sanction has been given to the Minister of State?

As a fourth point, I believe a historic opportunity has been missed in the setting up of this Department. There are now 17 Departments, including the Department of the Taoiseach, even though there are only 15 Cabinet Ministers. There was the fantastic situation of setting up a brand new Department, but the Government sent a very bad signal about its attitude towards rural Ireland by headquartering the Department of Rural and Community Development in Dublin. There was no need or reason for this. The normal personnel issues of people being in situ were not a challenge. The Government could have gone to the broad Civil Service and recruited someone who wanted to be a Secretary General in a rural area, people who wanted to work in the accounts division and so on. Experience has shown us that when people take Civil Service jobs in rural locations the problem arises in getting them to come back to Dublin, not in getting them out. There are more than enough people at the top level willing to work in rural Ireland.With modern technology there is no difficulty in working from remote locations now. The only regular travel involved might be the Secretary General coming to Dublin one day per week.

Then there is the issue of finance. The Minister will know that I have been pursuing this for a long time. The spend on the community side, most of which was previously in the remit of the Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment is not too bad. That is, 89% of the current spend has been used and one would expect that at this time of the year. Some 60% of the cap has been spent - that is small, but not disastrous. However, let us focus on the rural side. On 10 November 2017, ten months and one week into the year, the Minister has only spent 42% of the current expenditure. Normally, one would expect that at this time of the year the figure would be higher than 80% of current expenditure. Can the Minister provide a global explanation of how this has occurred? I am not asking for a line-by-line explanation, as we will come back to those issues. When I look at the capital spend, the situation gets even more serious. The Department has €67,389,000 in capital in its budget, and as of 10 November, only €13.999 million, 20% of the total, has been spent. That means that to have a full spend, the Minister will now have to spend 80% of the capital in the month and a half between now and the end of the year.

Furthermore, at the end of 2016, the Department prepaid local authorities €28 million for work that they had not done, work only sanctioned in December 2016. This is something I have never seen before. According to the last information I was given, which I got a few weeks ago, some €11 million of that had still not been spent. Any question of pre-paying local authorities at the end of this year will add insult to injury where under-spend is concerned. Furthermore in that regard, I notice that there is an intention to pay local authorities for work done on the local improvement schemes, LIS , up to 17 November on their own say-so, without any inspection. I must seriously question this. Not only will the Department pay them for that work, it will pay them for all of the LIS roads, hoping on a wing and a prayer that they will do them by the end of the year. I have had a lot of experience dealing with local authorities over the years. I was on a local authority, and then I had a lot of experience dealing with them in previous roles I had in the Oireacthas. To be quite honest, I would not give them the money until it was spent and I had a chance to inspect that the work was done to standard. It is a normal procedure. Let us be honest about it; if the Government was giving a housing grant of €4,000 to somebody, they would not give it unless they were satisfied that the work was done to the standard that was outlined. There seems to be a crisis of non-spend in the part of the Department that the Minister actually brought over with him from the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. He owes it to us to tell us whether he is going to hand massive amounts of money back to the Exchequer and carry forward10%, or is he again going to pre-pay local authorities for work not done? It is an utter crisis at this stage.