Ms Annmarie McHugh:

I am afraid that I am probably going to spoil it because I am going off script.

I am born and bred in Castleblayney, so much so that I married the next-door neighbour. I do not think one can get much more born and bred than that.

Our plan today is to go down through a number of different areas. Like Cappoquin, we will give a brief background to the Castleblayney regeneration town team and we will show the funding that the Government has very kindly given us. We feel we have used it very well and we would like to show the committee some pictures as to how we did that. We have also identified a number of opportunities, some of which concur with what Mr. McCarthy, Ms Delaney and Mr. Lord have said, and I promise we did not look at their material at all. The similarities there are quite interesting and we have also identified a number of threats.

For those of the committee who know Castleblayney, they may know it from from the Big Tom country music connection, Paddy Cole and a number of different musical people. It is situated very much in the centre, between Belfast and Dublin. From Whitehall to Castleblayney is a one hour journey; we are 69 miles from Dublin and 65 miles from Belfast. There are 3,607 residents in the town and, interestingly for us, we have more than the national average of non-nationals. This creates a very strong cultural dynamic in our town. The picture I have chosen here shows the market house, which has been alluded to earlier, and also shows how close we are to Lough Muckno. We are very blessed in Castleblayney that when one drives down through Main Street, if one turns right, one is presented with a beautiful lake and castle. We know how lucky we are in that respect but unfortunately that is also where some of our dereliction is.

In the far distance, if any members of the committee are golfers, we have the award-winning Concra Wood Golf and Country Club.

In May 2015, a public meeting was called in the town which approximately 70 people attended. From that in June 2015, Castleblayney Regeneration Committee was formed. As the committee can see, it is made up of a number of different groups: Tidy Towns, traders, heritage, tourism, Monaghan County Council - two or three members of which would sit in on our meetings every single month and with whom we have a very strong relationship - education, business, a newly formed sustainable energy group and Castleblayney Enterprise Centre. Our group is in existence for approximately four years now.

I will show the committee now some of the ways in which we have spent some of the money that has come from the Department, which is greatly appreciated by us. We really wanted to put Castleblayney on the map. One of the first things we did was to put up a big sign with Castleblayney on it showing all of the fishing and different heritage aspects of the town, so that one cannot pass us by.

We were also involved in the beautiful street initiative. We got some of the home owners to let us work with the different architects to come up with different colours for the buildings, and vintage colours are used. As members can see, it has really enhanced the outlook of the street. Our purpose in Castleblayney is to continue to make it a great place to live and to visit. It is a thriving town and we want to keep it like that. All our plans are aimed towards making it a town that is vibrant and full of energy.

In 2016, we were lucky to get €38,000, and with that money we tidied up the town by dealing with some things that were unsightly and we created some nice signs on the way into the town. On the five or six entrance roads to the town, there are double-sided signs telling people different things about the town that they may not know.

We got money for the public realm and economic plan as well. We have a full plan for what we could do and we are project ready. This is one way we spent money really well. We got a fantastic and very lifelike statue of Big Tom McBride. To his right is his son, who is the spitting image of him as members can see, and we also had President Higgins in our town and he unveiled that statue on 22 September. The picture on the right will show members all the people who came to the town. Some 4,000 people came that weekend, and the benefit from an economic point of view, which is where I know the committee wants us to be spending the money, because it wants it to drive all the towns economically, is that we used that to make sure all the bed and breakfast accommodation in the local area was completely full for that weekend. We built on from that, and on a further weekend we had another festival and we had the same impact. The money the Government is giving us is having a positive economic effect so we want to keep it coming. We had a great weekend that weekend.

We were also fortunate to get in excess of €2 million from a rural regeneration development fund for an enterprise centre. The benefit to the town is that it is not a quarter of a mile outside the town but is slap bang in the middle of the town in a derelict waste space that was contributing nothing to the town. Again, that will create jobs and energy and it will make the town look better.

By ourselves, we came up with the music wall of fame to keep people in the town so they do not just come and visit the Big Tom statue but also visit other places. This is a little walk and we also have a musical walk around the town. We have people like Anna McGoldrick and Paddy Cole etc., who all contributed to the musical heritage of our town. A month or two ago, we unveiled a wall mural to Paddy Cole. As members can see, Paddy is standing in front of it and it is a massive tribute to a great man from Castleblayney. It is directly opposite his house and it embraced an area of town that needed-----