Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

There had to be a housing need in the area. It seemed to miss the point. The lesson was that some investment has to be put in. We need a grant where we tell people we will give them a 45% or 55% grant to do up the house. It has to be a grant of over 55% for a person to be able to borrow the rest and to be able to foresee getting the money back at some stage. If we do that, a person will spend €40,000 doing up a house. If the person has a grant of about €25,000, within three months, between VAT, excise duty and income tax returns on the workers who do the work on the house, the Government will probably get most of the grant back. The money goes back in again and that is before ever talking about the spin-off arising from the activity in the community. There must be an acknowledgment somewhere that we are not spending money in rural Ireland but are investing money on which we get a return.

I know many rural villages. I live near Cloone in County Leitrim. It is a small village where the post office closed a few years ago. There is very little there but there is huge potential. I live in a rural parish called Aghavas where about 600 people live in rural scattered houses. There is no town or village. Next door to it is Gortletteragh which is the very same; there is no town or village. Half the parishes in County Leitrim are probably like that. There is no town or village. We have a huge problem with rural planning where people cannot get planning permission. If they want to go home and live in their local area they cannot get planning. I acknowledge that is not the Minister's problem.

I will address the local improvement scheme, LIS, for people living in rural areas. Many cul-de-sac roads have been taken off the list for some reason or other. They are no longer local authority roads, which they had been years ago. The only way in which people can get work done on their road now is through an LIS, in which they would have to put up some of the money themselves. In County Leitrim, there has been a long list of over 200 and good work was done last year in getting money for it. Money has been put down. I see €10 million here on the list for it this year. We need to get a lot more money put into it. It comes back to the idea of investment. When there is investment in a rural area, people feel valued. That is what needs to happen here. While the money that is there for it is welcome, it is not nearly enough. That is the point. I am sure the Minister and Minister of State will acknowledge it is not enough to cover the number of small country roads that are in that situation. Many of them lead to a couple of houses up a lane where, for example, there are elderly people living who cannot get home help in. There are a whole lot of issues that will be affected. A small bit of investment could make a big difference. Originally the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport was supposed to provide this money and it did not do so. I welcome that it is coming from somewhere. It is not nearly enough for the under-investment over the past seven, eight or ten years.