Dr. Breandán Ó Caoimh:

In addressing the question by Deputy Doherty, the breadth and range of this conversation underscores the importance of the céimeanna beaga, the joined-up approach. It is not the a one-Department responsibility here. One talks about the youth, that missing piece in the middle. Giving people a choice to return to the areas from which they have left, after they have received third level education, is what we need to look at. We need to put infrastructure in place to give people that choice.

Last week I gave a lecture to the University of the Highlands and Islands in Scotland. These are much more remote than our Gaeltacht areas, yet people go there for third level education, whereas we are sending people from the rural to the urban and expecting them to go back. We need to invest in the technology and hard infrastructure, in order to give people the choice to stay in the Gaeltacht and to give people lasmuigh den Ghaeltacht the deis to go into the Gaeltacht for education and to call into rural areas generally speaking. It is about putting those infrastructures in place to give people the choice, the hard and soft infrastructure, which is one's social capital and quality of life. Investment in community development yields dividends. It is not a luxury, it is not an add-on. Community and voluntary organisations were more adversely affected during the austerity period than any other sector that received public investment. There is a deficit and now we are beginning to reap the consequences of that deficit.

It is also important to recognise the importance of public sector investment. Private sector investment cannot take risks. It cannot innovate to the same extent as the public sector and private capital will always follow the public capital. The State needs to take the lead here in putting the investment and that positive discrimination into the Gaeltacht areas.

The other thing that we need to do in the future is to look at the geography. What is really clear from the All-Island Research Observatory, AIRO, report is the importance of the micro-geographies. The limistéir pleanála teanga are a new micro-geography and often more appropriate than the broad Gaeltacht areas. I have seen in my own area the differences between Gaeltacht Uíbh Rathach and Corca Dhuibhne. Within Uíbh Rathach - small as it is - the coastal parts are much more dynamic that the mountainous parts, and we must get that right. We also must look at what are called in planning terms these "fuzzy boundaries". That is where the language serves towns where the relationship between the rural and the urban is so important. We need to change the way county councils go about county development plans. They need to move from being land-use - we have just talked about planning permission - towards how we promote the potential of those places and how one local area is connected to another. We also need to look across county boundaries. We need to look at that fuzzy boundary and the spaces within which people operate rather than the administrative boundaries that we often impose on the planning system.

I agree with the first statement made by Deputy Doherty. This is not a policy document, this is an evidence base. We need to move towards evidence-based planning. We need to move away from developer-led planning to plan-led development and that is why the investment in this kind of research is absolutely fundamental and will stand us in good stead in the longer term.