Pádraig Mac Lochlainn (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I apologise for having missed the presentation earlier. I have seen a copy of it.

Deputy McConalogue touched on the issue of Leader funding. We were very proud of the previous model we had in Ireland in that it was rooted in communities, which is a big issue, as the witnesses know, in that it is desirable that European programmes be bottom-up rather than top-down and that the community genuinely feel a sense of ownership. It was a very good model and it has been changed. Communities have sought to soften the initial proposals for change, but it is not the same system it was across the board.

The other issue we hear repeatedly from Leader companies across the State is that there are serious delays in getting the funding out. It is much more bureaucratic than it was. We had a Leader system which was at the forefront of rural regeneration in Ireland, which was a template, which was the system that would be held up as the poster boy at European level and which was offered to other European states as the way to do things. What are the witnesses' views on the way we unravelled that and the problems there are with delays in getting the funding into communities? We now hear of profound delays across the State. Did this arise in the witnesses' research?