Dr. Senan Cooke:

I would like to ask everyone a question. I agree with everything I have heard on this side and everything I have heard from the members, and I am not being nice to them. There are lots of good ideas from everyone. I am going to leave here and there will be a row in the first place I go into , although I will not want a row. Going in with a reasonable request on one occasion, I was asked which letter in the word "No" did I not understand, the "N" or the "O". I was then asked whether I had a problem. We have the LEADER programme with all these brilliant ideas and they are doing brilliant work. The committee members are doing brilliant work as well. I read about them in the newspaper and I look at them on the television and this "That is a great idea." For example, there was a good idea about social welfare. The good idea about rural Ireland is put forward time and time again. The suggestions Senator Coffey came up with, even the suggestions he put there to us, are good. What is the problem? How can we deal with the gap between all of us and the system?

I do not blame anybody in the public service for anything. The system they are forced to manage forces then to implement actions. When people go to the public house they will be asked if they have heard about something - things that could not be made up. The LEADER programme came out some time ago with a 50% grant for communities and it was equated with a 50% grant for the private sector. A community of volunteers was equated with private people looking for profit. That could not be made up. Those are issues that we spend much of our time thinking about.

We had a young chap and we begged Tús administrators to let him stay with us for another year. It would have suited us and it would have given us more work. He had a degree but he had been bullied in school. The difference he was making would not be believed. When the 12 months were up, Tús took him away from us and gave him nothing. Three years later, he is eligible again. He is being told that he did great work with us three years ago. We are being asked to given him another year. He is 28 or 29 years of age and a lovely fellow with lots of potential. We had him for 12 months, we were doing great work with him, he was coming out of himself and talking to us freely and he was getting involved. He would not say "Boo" when he came first. Where was he for the past three years? He is back on 23 September. The only place Tús wants to put him now is back to us because it thought that when he was with us first he was going well so perhaps now he can pick it up three years later and we can build on what we were doing with him. There are a million of those type social welfare issues, which I could talk to the committee all day and all night about. Between us we have all of the answers, so why can we not implement all of these measures? Why can we not give that role to LEADER? I do not understand.