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

I do not necessarily agree with what Senator Coffey has said about a number of things. Some of the agencies who have dealt with me in the past will know my view. Ultimately when one looks at sources of money there are two strands - European and Government. It is really only one source because normally what the Government does is disburse European money mixed with Government money. The Government does the mixing before it gets rid of it. Having multiple agencies funding the same project always reminds me of the Nile Delta. It starts with one river, breaks into a whole lot of bits and then joins at the end again as one river running into the sea. It does not seem to be efficient for the applicant group or as a way for the Government to be dispensing money because there are so many agencies involved. Each agency has its costs and overheads and each one is an overhead for the applicant body.

The greenway to Dungarvan, which I had a bit of an association with in its earliest form, is an example. I cannot understand why one Government Department could not fund it from beginning to end. That leads to a point that relates to Pobal. There was a multitude of small partnerships and LEADER companies which overlapped. Poor customers on the ground in some areas often found they did not have access to SICAP but their next door neighbours did. In some areas one could go to a LEADER partnership company and get all one's services. In other areas one had to go through a LEADER company and a partnership company and it was a case of never the twain shall meet. We amalgamated all of that so there was a LEADER partnership company covering 100% of rural Ireland and partnership companies on their own covering all of urban Ireland. Everybody was covered. We put in the rural social scheme and the Tús scheme. The idea at the time was that in any one area one could go to a one-stop shop for a whole wide range of services. The idea was that if any new services were provided and if there were any gaps in the market, the services would be delivered through the one-stop shop which requires a Government agency locally. Is Pobal a more efficient model, particularly for the applicant, than a model in which there are all these different agencies and people come into their offices and given a big list of people to go to when in 90% of cases there is no money there for the applicant?

The other problem with the multi-agency model is not that they are all queuing up to compete to give but that they are queueing up to tell people why to go to the other guy, particularly if it is not a particularly good application. It is not the position that somebody evaluates the application and tells applicants what they need for a successful application. In that context I am a little surprised that the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine did not put the money into the ACORNS scheme through the LEADER partnership companies. I accept there is a total slack in the market and that there are more male entrepreneurs than female. That issue should have been dealt with. I have no problem with that. SICAP should have dealt with it. It was supposed to deal with its target groups. SICAP is about target groups. It was about one-parent families. It was about older people. It is about all the unemployed and so on. If it was an identified subset of what SICAP was doing, I cannot understand why a new agency was set up. That is just a particular hang-up of mine. It is not a new hang-up. Those who have dealt with me for well over ten or 15 years will know that as somebody who was involved in development on the ground as a manager of a community co-op, I could write a book on all of this.

My second question relates to forms and a fetish I have. More and more forms seem to require answers in essay format. An example of a question is "Please explain why your area is disadvantaged". If one is a good professor of disadvantage, one would write a whole lot of stuff. I will not use the term I would like to use to describe it in this respectable forum. It seems to me now that there are professionals who will write the stuff if they are paid enough money and who know exactly the buttons to press. It does not mean they have a better case than the person who just writes the truth. This has become a whole industry on every side. One needs to get an expert to fill in one's application for sports capital funding. One has to pay money to get the form for the sports capital funding filled in. There are other forms. Bidding wars go on for filling out forms. One night I got a form that was in the Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, as it was at the time, and I stayed up late and I got the form and there were all these "Yes" or "No" questions such as "Are you in a deprived area?". I decided to get rid of all the questions that required essay responses and replaced them with questions about whether an applicant was in the RAPID area or CLÁR area. No matter what case the applicant made I knew that RAPID areas had been scientifically defined as being urban areas with higher social deprivation and I knew the CLÁR areas were the ones with the biggest population decline. If I wanted a definition of disadvantage, it was all mapped to the square inch. Therefore, I came in the following day with a nice simplified form with questions that required a "Yes" or "No" answer to virtually every question. It did not rely on the ability of the person writing the form or judgment of the person reading it to determine how good the essay was. It just became an essay writing competition. I felt there was a more objective and fair way of giving out the money. We seem to have regressed to the essay form. The Department of Rural and Community Development has a lot of new forms that require a lot of essay answers. Has Pobal in particular looked at this issue and asked why essay replies are required for obvious questions? Does it favour the people who are strongest at writing over the most worthy groups? Are we pushing more vulnerable groups that could do great work on the ground away? They are people who just get the job done but are not big into the writing phenomenon that seems to be a modern thing.

Pobal had a decentralisation programme and 30 or 40 jobs in Clifden. I understand they operate very efficiently. Is it the intention to pursue that? We did it on the basis that all new jobs given to Pobal by the State would be located outside of Dublin and that Pobal would not move people who were settled in Holbrook House. Has Pobal pursued that? This city is full of civil servants trying to get out of the place. From what I hear the office in Clifden works perfectly and the wages get paid every week without fail. It has a very high level of performance with very little oversight from Dublin. One of the best ways of creating rural jobs is to bring all those services that we control ourselves to rural Ireland. We talk about the IDA going to rural Ireland but companies coming in will do whatever they want to do. There is an easy, soft way of doing it by basing all new jobs in Clifden.

The community services programme is a programme I really like but I was shocked to learn recently that the one-for-one payment covering the minimum wage to full-time equivalents, FTEs, has been eroded considerably in the past two or three years and it is putting huge pressure on things like meals on wheels and community centres with limited incomes.

Was that recommended by Pobal or was it imposed by the Department against Pobal's will? It might be an unfair question but it is valid.

I read Microfinance Ireland's report with interest. I remember ten or 15 years ago talking to somebody in a county enterprise board who was boasting that jobs were being created for €500 or €1,000 a piece. I was cynical enough to say that if they could be created with that kind of money, the board's money was probably not needed. As somebody who was involved in job creation for a long time, I always get a bit worried when I find out the cost of creating a job is less than €2,000. One might set up a hairdresser's which, while it is a fantastic and necessary service, will require displacement. Every time I see a supermarket is opening with 500 jobs, I ask how many small shops are being pushed out. That is the nature of life, but it is not net 500 jobs. If one is talking about industry and so on, my experience is that €2,000 will not do anything. Most businesses, if they are to have any success, will be well over a €25,000 requirement after a year. When do they graduate to there?

I have travelled around for the past year and a half. There was a guy who employed eight people in a factory that closed. Enterprise Ireland, EI, suggested to me it would be reopened, and I managed to locate somebody to take it over. He is doing high-quality work, some of which in its previous existence was in this House. He needs the two buildings to be relocated into one, and he requires €1.5 million. In fairness the Minister came down to visit. We have scoured all the agencies, from the Western Development Commission, EI, IDA, the enterprise board and so on. The businessman needs some assistance with the building because if he borrowed at commercial rates it would not be viable, but there are eight jobs that will be there. It is totally sustainable, but not if has to put €1.5 million on the table for a building. With all the plethora of agencies, it does not seem there is any that can help. Where does Pobal graduate to after it is finished with Microfinance Ireland? What interest rates are being charged? What rate of failure does Microfinance Ireland have? If it is a low rate of failure, Microfinance Ireland is a failure. If bodies are lending money and they never have a failure, they are a failure themselves. Microfinance Ireland is meant to be the borrower of last resort and, therefore, there will be winners and losers. I am curious to know of the 1,830 businesses since Microfinance Ireland started, how many failures have there been? Fair enough, you win some, you lose some, but how many have succeeded beyond Microfinance Ireland's wildest dreams?

When Microfinance Ireland is assessing, how much does it assess the person and the promoter, and how much does it do it on a desktop analysis? The desktop analysis must obviously be done, and if a business does not make common sense it should not be funded. I am blue in the face saying that. On the other hand, when I was involved with people who worked for me in my previous life, I would pick out the likely people and encourage them to set up in business, some of whom had successful business. There had to be something to do, but equally there had to be the person to do it. How does Microfinance Ireland balance those two? I have seen in many cases that if one got the right person, the sky was the limit, whereas if one got the wrong person, no matter how good the idea was, it failed. Is it just desktop or does Microfinance Ireland interview these people? Is it allowed to do what credit unions used to be allowed to do, and which they seem not to be allowed to do anymore, which is make a judgment on the person sitting before them of whether he or she has that X factor to make it happen? We recognise that with the big entrepreneurs and that not everyone is a Michael O'Leary. If someone else had got Ryanair at the time it was going bust rather than Michael O'Leary, we might not have cheap flights to Britain. Is Microfinance Ireland allowed to assess the person, or is it totally rigid?