Mr. Kevin McCarthy:

There is quite a lot of ground to cover there. On the question of interaction with other Departments and the need to avoid duplication, identify gaps and so on, we do have a lot of interaction with other Departments. On the climate action front, we are represented on the relevant Cabinet committee and the senior officials group that feeds into it. More generally, our interface with other Departments is core to what we do. Our remit concerns supporting and promoting the development of rural communities and communities generally. We can only do that by interacting with Departments across a wide range of remits, including transport, tourism, heritage and so on. We have a lot of interaction with those Departments. We try to share as much information as we can and get the best possible understanding of other Departments' agendas and their various programmes, projects, initiatives, policies etc. We try to align with them and add value where we can.

I recognise this is an area in which we always can do better. We have to continue to seek to do better. On the climate front, I would not pretend that the things we are supporting do anything more than touch the margins in a lot of these areas. Someone referred to the fact that we have a small budget. In the scheme of things, we are a small player in terms of the scale of our investments and what they can achieve. However, we can have an influence through our interaction with other Departments, particularly by offering other Departments the capacity to engage with communities at a local level. Our role is in supporting community organisations and the structures that allow them to engage effectively with Government, and in helping them to build the capacity to do so. We see that as a really important part of our responsibility.

Deputy Heydon touched on an important point in his question about those areas where community and civic engagement are less well developed. That is a real challenge for us. The degree of social capital in a community is an element here. The better the community is able to access information on what is available, the better it is equipped to exploit the benefits of various Government investments. We have a duty to support the communities that are less well developed on that front. The structure of local community development committees and public participation networks is very much a developing structure. Supporting local authorities in building that structure is a part of our responsibility. We are putting resources into directly supporting them in doing that. I refer to the capacity-building issues around training, sharing best practice, networking and supporting networks of communities in order that they can learn from one another.

There are some specific things concerning the LEADER programme about which my colleague might wish to speak, such as sharing best practice between LEADER groups around the country so that people can see what other communities have done and see the potential. Community groups can talk to each other about how they have accomplished things and learn from that. We see our potential contribution as creating the facility for all of that to happen.

Deputy Heydon specifically mentioned the energy communities. The SEAI, is doing brilliant work to support the energy groups that are in place.

It has a really good programme of development with those communities. We are meeting the SEAI next week to talk about that programme and how we can weigh in behind it through our interaction with local authorities and local community organisations on various fronts.

Deputy Heydon's comments on the town and village programme are very welcome. That programme has had a huge impact. Since 2016 there has been very significant investment and 675 projects around the country have been supported. Through a sequence of calls we have an established lead-in for local authorities and communities to identify the potential of that programme. We are seeing an increasingly high quality of proposals coming through from communities, which are feeding into approvals under that scheme.

The rural regeneration and development fund involves investment of a significant scale. I spoke about our budget being minor in the overall scheme but the new fund created by Government under the national development plan amounts to €1 billion over the next ten years. That gives us the opportunity to have an impact on rural regeneration in all its forms and to help communities deliver on the various national strategic outcomes in the national planning framework including on the climate action front. One of the challenges is to ensure that fund does leverage the possibility to build on the investments and commitments of other Departments. We have a good mechanism for interacting with other Departments in their investment plans to ensure that fund is adding value and is helping communities make the best of the possibilities from Government.