Dr. Breandán Ó Caoimh:

I can see that the Chairman's training as a geographer has stood him in good stead. I was a geography lecturer myself so in terms of identifying particular areas, certain areas have been mentioned with greater frequency this afternoon and I concur with the Chairman on that.

He asked about the viability of places. We do not put glass ceilings on communities and we should not do so with the Gaeltacht communities either. The Chairman rightly identified the issue of housing and that is a national issue in terms of the supply issues, property rights and the ownership of houses. I was on Cléire last week because I have a PhD student working on information and communications technology, ICT, and how Gaeltacht communities and island communities use ICT. There are houses there that are habitable but owned by people who live overseas and so on. There is a need to compile a register of those and to look at mechanisms whereby, rather than just carrying out the rural resettlement model, we actually invest those houses in the ownership of local co-operatives, because most of the Gaeltacht areas do have the formal co-operative structures that could take this on board and provide the social housing solutions that are required. As we do that, we should not do so in such a way as happened in parts of the Chairman's constituency where we had a gentrification, some of the local people were displaced and some of the young professionals were brought in. This should be community-led. It should involve the community and be part of the community development process and that is very important. It should not be tokenistic either.

There is great potential to use the housing infrastructure and also the other infrastructure that is there. For example, the school on Cléire has nobody below second class and yet there is a classroom with two excellent teachers. The infrastructure is there and we need to avail of same, rather than rehabilitating schools in the suburbs of Dublin as the Department was under pressure to do this year. I will not say it was putting good money after bad because investment in education is always good but we certainly need to be more intelligent about how we use the infrastructure such as houses, schools, roads, ports etc. that are in the Gaeltacht areas.

The Chairman also mentioned that the Government offices and so on should not be taking people out of the Gaeltacht. I do not want to talk about decentralisation but we have to because it is one of the elephants in the room. When we talk about decentralisation we are not just talking about the transfer of Departments because that is not really decentralisation, that is just moving functions geographically. We need real decentralisation where local people have a real say in decision-making. As we move Government offices, and there will always be new functions in Government, we should move those to the Gaeltacht areas and to rural areas rather than trying to go through the arduous process that we tried to go through in 2003 and 2004 with the moving of existing services. As new facilities and new offices come up, and they come up all the time, rural areas and Gaeltacht areas should be positively discriminated towards to locate them there and we should work with the trade unions to that end as well.