Michael Ring (Mayo, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Deputy Ó Cuív asked three questions and I will answer them as best I can. On the spend, I am confident that we will have this funding spent by the end of the year. I may have to reallocate some funding. I am monitoring this, not from week to week but on a day-to-day basis. I will give the Deputy one commitment today. The money will be spent this year.

I am confident, in relation to LEADER which the Deputy raised, that approximately €26 million this year will be drawn down. I will continue to monitor this daily. I will have a few ideas in the next couple of weeks about how to spend this funding.

The Deputy knows well the position regarding local authorities. I will not say anything more because I am fed up saying it. We sit down and make an agreement with them.

The Deputy is quite correct, they were putting pressure on me to put the funding out early in the year. I put the money out early in the year. I could not have put it out any earlier. In respect of LIS, I cannot do any more. They have to do the work. When I gave it late, they complained. They also complained when I gave it earlier. I do not know what I can do. Some of this may have to do with capacity. The local authorities did not have LIS for the past few years. They now know that they have it.

As Deputy Ó Cuív stated, I did get the local authorities to send in a secondary list in respect of LIS. I will consider that in the next few days. I checked with some of the councillors in my county in advance of this meeting to find out if these roads were done. Many of them have been done. The councils are so flush with money they are not in a hurry looking for it. I cannot understand that and I read the local newspapers every week and see councillors complaining that they cannot get enough money and that there is not enough money going in. I am putting money into their pigeonholes and they are not able to draw it down. I will be monitoring this between now and the end of the year. In response to the Deputy's question, I intend to have spent my budget between now and the end of the year.

Deputy Ó Cuív and many others have been here long enough to know that when a new Department is set up from scratch, there is a lot of work involved. We set it up last year in July and worked as a functioning Department, and the number of schemes and the amount of money we delivered last year was a credit to the Secretary General and to the tremendous staff who worked hard in difficult circumstances, some even without offices. I think we did a tremendous job. I will give Deputy Ó Cuív one commitment: this money will be spent. There will be no money left unspent. The Deputy has been asking about the underspend. He must worry at night about the underspend and not sleep. I can understand that because he had a lot of it in the period 2008 to 2010 - his Department had €38 million in 2008, €3 million in 2009 and €34 million in 2010. That was when the country was booming, when everything was going well and when people were working. This Department has done a tremendous job and I have no doubt that I will spend this money. I give that commitment now, even if I have to stay awake at night worrying about it. I will give an undertaking that this money will be spent.