Michael Collins (Cork South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister and Minister of State. In most cases, their budget has been very well spent and helps in rural Ireland. I will give some feedback. I do not want to seem in any way negative as there are a great deal of positive aspects to this, which we should acknowledge. However, there are some areas of concern that I would like the Minister to consider.

Some €2 million in funding was provided for walkways last year and it is hoped to provide €4 million this year. I come from a very picturesque area in west Cork which was probably the first to start walkways when James O'Mahony and his team did some incredible work on the Sheep's Head Way. I imagine when they spoke to the farmers about walkways at the time, they were looked at as if they had two heads. However, walkways have grown and developed and we now have the Beara Way and many other successes throughout the country. There is a considerable amount of funding available for gates, stiles and steps but the impression I get is that there is no funding extended to farmers. There is great potential for a Mizen way and many farmers have voluntarily given access to their lands. They receive initial funds for stiles, probably from the €2 million provided, there is no long-term funding to make payments to farmers for allowing people to go through their lands. Such payments could be used to maintain the land. It is important that this be addressed for the sake of tourism and generating a small bit of an income because many smaller farmers are struggling. I would appreciate if, for 2019, the Minister would look into compensating farmers all year around. This would not require a large amount of money but it is necessary to the farmers, some of whom are giving access to their lands free of charge, having been given an initial grant. They should be rewarded, which would encourage others to come on board and be positive for tourism in these communities in the long term.

The Minister brought community involvement scheme back from nowhere. No matter how much money he has, it is never enough. I expect Cork County Council has an endless list of people looking for schemes. The funding for the community involvement scheme should be increased because it is greatly appreciated in rural communities. Some council areas might have funding for only one or two schemes when they may have a list of 50 schemes. Money cannot be got for everything but it is great that the scheme has started again.

I was a fierce advocate of the previous LEADER scheme. I always took the view that if it ain't broke, don't fix it, but somebody tried to fix it and it still broke. That is the impression that I have received from communities. Many people are finding the application process very difficult. I was involved in community groups over the years and went through the previous application process. There would have been somebody there at the other end of the phone, at least, but that system has gone. I was told by someone who secured funding recently that they would never submit an application to LEADER. It is bad when one hears community people saying that. In another case, an application was returned requesting further information. I do not know how many pages had to be filled in with further information. It is an exhaustive process which is difficult for people who are giving of their time freely. I know that everything has to be checked out to ensure it is 100% correct but more administrative staff are needed to help people. Since the LEADER company closed in west Cork, there is nobody available to help. The sense I get is that the funding has come back but accessing it is not as easy as it used to be. I ask the Minister to examine this because it is very serious. In the past, when I mentioned funding to people in west Cork, the LEADER programme was the first thing that came to mind but it is not the last. No one discusses LEADER any longer whereas it used to be a hot topic. The funding provided is not as good as it used to be. The programme helped get many farm and tourism businesses up and running but that seems to be gone by the wayside. This area requires a strong focus.

I do not want to hog the time but if we cover everything together, we can get through this much quicker. The Minister of State, Deputy Canney, spoke about funding for broadband and mobile phone coverage but it is not going anywhere. It is difficult to see where it will go. I hope an announcement on rural broadband is imminent but mobile phone coverage has not been touched on. We hit the doorsteps canvassing in elections and now that I am out now canvassing for my brother, Councillor Danny Collins, people are asking me the same question they asked during the general election campaign. They say there is no broadband and no mobile phone coverage and ask me what I have done about it. I have no answer for them and it is three years on from the general election. This is a serious issue and the mobile phone companies need to be brought to the table or perhaps brought before the committee to discuss why they cannot tackle the issue. They are running around after 5G now but, good God, some people cannot even get one bar of coverage. This must be pulled back. There must be some regulation to say to these companies that they can forget about their 5G and that they should go away and deliver a couple of bars of mobile phone coverage for people in their houses or communities. That would be a great start and we could worry about 4G, 5G or 6G after that. There is not much point in bringing up broadband now.

I have been involved in a community alert group in west Cork for the past 26 or 27 years. There is funding available for aid calls but little funding for the groups. We did a church collection in Schull and Lowertown last week and we raised €450.

We have to pay for the insurance and the affiliation of Muintir na Tíre. There needs to be something more. While some of it is covered now with grant aid in fairness, there needs to be more concentration on funding going forward because groups are begging on the doorstep. If one is involved in a school board, one is out trying to do cake sales, if one is involved in a community alert group or a community council, one must beg from the public all the time. Community alert groups should be concentrating on attendance at their meetings, trying to deliver for people, meeting elderly people and getting the aid calls out there. The focus should not be on worrying if they can pay the small bills that come in and that need to be paid. There needs to be a better concentration on funds if at all possible.

We met the Charities Regulator in Leinster House some time ago in the audiovisual room. I presume the funding that is being referred to and that can be spent might arise where elderly members of community groups have passed away, the funding is lying there and such groups may have given it back. My argument with the regulator was that if, for instance, there was a group in County Mayo where the members have grown elderly and are unable to continue and where €10,000 was left in the account, that will go back to the Charities Regulator if that community group will be inactive in the future. That money should go back into Mayo. Money came out of a council in west Cork and while that money went anywhere and everywhere, it has not come back to west Cork. If this is the money the Minister is able to spend in this regard, that needs to be looked into. If a community has had to hand back €4,000 or €8,000, that money should have gone back into that community, because that is where that money came from in the first place. It should not be distributed to the Charities Regulator and perhaps spread around Dublin or wherever.

The community services programme, CSP, is a great programme and I am involved in a group that has a number of workers through the CSP. The issue is that the material grant was taken from it a number of years ago. Ultimately, regardless of whether a worker is with a rural social scheme or a community employment, CE, scheme, he or she will need a strimmer and will need material and it is not available. We need concentrate more on CSP workers. They are landed on the community group, which must then go back to the church gate collection again to buy the strimmers or pay for the fuel to strim the graveyard or whatever the workers are doing. They might be working in the social centre and in our case, we have a halls programme. This funding is for whatever they need to purchase. The CSP programme is providing the wage as such but the material grants were taken from a lot of the groups, mainly the rural groups, and they are the ones finding it the hardest to survive and to keep the doors open. I would appreciate it if the Government would go back and look at that.

The Tidy Towns groups take a great amount of pressure off local authorities, they do a lot of fabulous work and any funds they get are greatly appreciated. Any such groups I know very much appreciate that.

I will only talk about one more matter because I do not want to be going on all night and that is the rural regeneration fund. A large amount of money is to be given out to community voluntary groups because that is what the Taoiseach said at the launch of this programme. I have nothing against companies like Coillte and Teagasc but I get worried when I see such companies or a number of LEADER companies applying for funding. The Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht has its own budget of approximately €360 million and these companies are getting top-ups from the rural regeneration programme. Then I look at community voluntary groups getting zero, so there is something wrong.

There is one project I raised in the Dáil in the presence of the Minister of State, Deputy Canney, where a community voluntary group in Schull spent €50,000 of its own money to try to get this project to the point of being what they were told would be shovel-ready. They are being told it is shovel-ready and then are being told it is not. It is dribbling back and forth like a game of tennis. They do not know whether it is shovel-ready or not. The Minister should remember one thing. If the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht has a budget of approximately €360 million, these groups have no budget like that. They could never dream about such a budget but they can guarantee jobs in a town. Every assistance should be given to them to make sure that if they have an issue, it can be resolved within a week or two of the first announcement that they did not get funding but that is not happening. They have never been told what the problem is, unless they have been told today, and they are begging and pleading. This project alone would have created numerous jobs in a community that is absolutely starved because rural peninsulas are starved of employment and there is no point in denying it.

The cities are doing well and a lot of people are going from the rural communities to the cities. I am trying to say that a body such as the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht has a budget of approximately €360 million and Coillte has a budget. Such bodies all have their own massive budgets. The Minister will counter that point by telling me that they are putting forward great projects but these other community voluntary groups are failing to tick the boxes and are failing to get the funding for some reason they do not know about. They are spending their own €50,000 in their own town. There is something wrong somewhere and I would appreciate the Government trying to put it right.