Michael Collins (Cork South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

First I would like to congratulate the Minister and the Minister of State on their appointments. I fought a long time for a standalone Minister for rural and community affairs and we have that now. It is a very important position because rural issues had been slightly left behind down the years. I hope we will be able to address many issues in the future and work closely together.

I will start on a positive note, the local improvements scheme. It is a great scheme. I see some of the examples of that in west Cork, where people need to get their local roads sorted. One has just been finished in Ballineen. I regret that the €10 million for that came out of the Leader budget but it had to come out of some budget. It is delivering and working now.

The Minister spoke about Cork County Council spending only 21%, which stuns me. I would have expected that a local authority when it gets the money would try to get it out as quickly as possible. The Minister, however, must remember that his Government gave them the Leader programme when it should have examined the figures prior to that. Instead, it broke up the excellent system that was there. It probably needed a bit of tweaking to get sorted out but the Government tampered with it and made a complete mess of it. If someone mentioned Leader, development partnership or funding three or four years ago in west Cork everybody would tell them where and how they could get it if they rang a certain number. If it is mentioned now the person would be told to forget about it because it is gone. That is the rumour going around. The local authority was not able to take control of that programme, which had been run very efficiently by the development partnerships. Unfortunately, the Government pulled the plug which has been detrimental to rural communities. I do not need to tell any Deputy here where Leader funding has gone through the years. It looks as if we are coming close to the end of the programme we have at the moment and we have a little over two years left.

The Minister said that the money was not being spent in the last programme but at least they had four years. We are heading for two years left in this programme and there is little or no money spent. Some of the staff from some of the companies have not been paid their redundancy payments which is scandalous and very unfair after they had served people for many years. In my area in west Cork their stamp was remarkable and now it is embarrassing to mention Leader. I would not even mention it at any public meeting when people ask me where they will get funding because it does not happen and it is only frustrating people.

The Minister was in west Cork recently. I am sorry I did not have the opportunity to welcome him but I was not even told he was coming. I assume in my role as a politician that Ministers are Ministers for the people and not for one individual Deputy in one area. The Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Deputy Ross, who is a member of the Independent Alliance was in west Cork as were the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment, Deputy Naughten and the Minister of State at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Moran, and when I knew they were coming I let my fellow Deputies know, to be fair to everybody. That did not happen when the Minister for Rural and Community Development came down. Notice did not come from the Department or from the local Deputy. Many of the projects the Minister visited in Drinagh were absolutely delighted to get funding but we were involved in that too. It is important for Ministers to know that when they are in a community they should at least let public representatives know and not politicise the visit.

I sincerely hope that the Minister can get hold of the community employment, CE, schemes. To be fair to the Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection, Deputy Regina Doherty, she is a good Minister. One can talk to her and she tries her best to resolve issues but there is a little misunderstanding about CE workers in rural communities. I know people aged 59 or 60 who are delighted to work in their local communities but they are going home now because their time is up and they will never get a job again. They will literally be looking out the window and drawing social welfare instead of being out working for the €20 or €30 extra a week they were getting. They were happy to do that work. The community groups are fighting to keep them and they are fighting to stay because they like the work. They are a loss to the community and are very hard to replace. We are given all the carry-on about unemployment dropping but 60,000 are going onto new schemes and 40,000 are going back on social welfare after going through that system. I hope we can address that. The rural social scheme is another big issue. I hope there will be an extra allocation of workers. They will be better distributed because, unlike the local authority, the West Cork Development Partnership is allocating rural social workers in west Cork in a very fair manner. Our numbers per head of population were very low and I hope we will be looked on more favourably in the new allocation of workers.

I would expect that rural proofing comes under the Minister's brief because it is not working at the moment. There are many announcements about it. The Minister for Health, Deputy Harris mentioned it last week. The Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Deputy Ross, was not present when I was speaking on the Road Traffic (Amendment) Bill 2017 last night. Where is the rural proofing? The Ministers say they are meeting with the groups and telling them what they are doing. They announce changes happening. The Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport said last night when speaking on the Road Traffic (Amendment) Bill 2017 that he met with all the groups but no transport has been put in place to deal with people living in rural isolation which prevents them going for a social drink and causes worry. The same is true of the Public Health (Alcohol) Bill 2017 because shopkeepers are worried about what it will do to their supermarkets. The Minister for Health is ploughing ahead. It is lovely to say we are rural proofing but the Minister needs to sit down and see how he can resolve an issue before he puts a Bill before the people.

With no disrespect to the Minister, the local authority broadband is not going to work at all. It is not working in west Cork. We have seen very little expansion of rural broadband and I am worn out talking to the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment on this issue. It is a big issue. The first thing people will tell any politician knocking on doors, whenever that will be, this year, next year or the year after, is that they have no broadband and that to get mobile phone coverage they have to go upstairs and hang their heads out the window. These issues are not progressing. If Leader was working they could be rolled out through a Leader programme and communities would roll it out for themselves.

I can assure the Minister that if we were to stand back, it would be done then. We did it in Goleen, a rural community near Mizen Head. We rolled out broadband when people did not know what it meant. I did not know what it meant myself to be quite honest. We were able to get it and it was wireless broadband at the time, which was perhaps 15, 16 or 17 years ago, but it has not progressed since. The Government is cherry-picking the big towns and the percentage looks good, but it will put the private operator out of business, which is a serious issue that no one seems to realise. Take a town such as Bantry. If the rural broadband scheme comes in and takes out the town of Bantry, the private operator, who is providing it to all the rural places the scheme will not touch, will be put out of business. I can see us facing broadband crises before the national scheme, which is repeatedly postponed, is rolled out. I will be looking for my pension before we see it happening. We need to be very careful about the road we are travelling. It is nice to be cherry-picking the bigger towns and taking them out of it but, all of a sudden then, the guy who is currently providing broadband will no longer be able to provide it.

I have worries about the Charities Act too. I know and accept that there had to be a lot of cleaning up there. The Minister mentioned it. However, many elderly people in community groups who never caused a problem to anyone in the world are now getting letters from what looks like the Revenue Commissioners and they are extremely worried. Many of them have disbanded. These community groups would have continued away nicely. They might not have been active for two or three years and then they would have come alive again and collected €20,000 for someone who had a serious accident down the road. Not every community group can have an accountant or that kind of expertise, but they worked efficiently. However, they are being made to look very bad now under this Charities Act. The suggestion is that they are being cleaned up now because there is something wrong, although there is not. Many of these groups are being disbanded and I would like clarity about where their moneys are now. Many of them said that they are not going to deal with the new requirements and for the €8,000 or €10,000 in the account to be taken. This money is going back into the system. Is that money being distributed in the community from which it was taken? I attended a recent presentation and it was not clear to me that the money was going back to the community from which it was taken. It should go back to that community because it was genuinely collected there. The group that has disbanded because it is not able to take on the new system has lost that money and the community has lost that money. That issue needs to be addressed.

I had better stop.