Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I was looking at the advisory board of the rural fund. It includes the Departments of Housing, Planning and Local Government, Communications, Climate Action and Environment, Business, Enterprise and Innovation, Agriculture, Food and Marine, and Transport, Tourism and Sport. That is five Departments and Ms Rooney's Department is also included, so that is six. Why was the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht not included? It has responsibility for the geographic area of na Gaeltachataí and the islands and it has responsibility for all the waterways, which one would have thought would be a big focus. It affects the Chairman's constituency, Leitrim up into Fermanagh and so on. It also has responsibility for national parks and wildlife. The Department of Business, Enterprise and Innovation, with responsibility for IDA Ireland and for Enterprise Ireland and SFADCo and Ms Rooney's Department has responsibility for the Western Development Commission, but the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht has responsibility for Údarás na Gaeltachta, probably the most multifunctional of all the development agencies there. Why was it not on the advisory board given that it is very relevant to it?

The Department can provide 70% of funding and 80% in some exceptional circumstances. Can the lead agency or another State agency provide the other 20%? There would be obvious implications for that.

Ms Rooney said that the spend was €22 million to date. From next week, and we need to take out weekends and Christmas, there will be about 20 days of spend. What does Ms Rooney expect the Department's outturn to be? Her estimate was in excess of €50 million for the year and it is now about 40% of that.

As a general comment, Údarás na Gaeltachta should not have had to go to the Department. It should have had enough funding to do it itself. The Department has done an excellent project in west Connemara that I do not think would have happened without the Department's fund. I am not convinced on the totality of it, that it is not a whole duplication. As far as most of the village renewal and town renewal is concerned, we should just fund local authorities properly so that they can do these things themselves without running around with a begging bowl from agency to agency, thus duplicating the whole administration, the system delays and so on, but that is a personal view.

The difference between this fund and CLÁR is how matching funding was done in CLÁR which was fundamentally different. This fund is open to the whole country because there is another fund in another Department, namely, Housing, Planning and Local Government, for the big towns and cities. Everyone is in this gig and it is not trying to achieve an objective of pulling the money in one direction. It would be claimed that, between the two Departments, all the assistance is covered. The idea with CLÁR matching funding was there was a perception, which I think was valid, that the depopulated areas did not get their fair share of funding. There was a pull factor, therefore, where a previous Government decided to pull the money into these areas by saying it would provide a euro where there was a good project in a depopulated area. I used to do that in the islands where if someone built a health centre, for example, we would provide 50% matching funding, but that was to pull money into areas that normally would not be able to compete in getting priority for funds. Since this is open priority for the whole country, it does not have that bigger philosophical logic behind matching funding.

An interesting paper was written for the Department of Rural and Community Development on RAPID. I did not agree with the paper but it excoriated the principle of matching funding. I am wondering why it has since come back to fashion. It was one of these value for money things. The Minister gave it to me and it excoriated the whole idea of matching funding. I thought it was wrong because it missed the whole point that it was matching funding into very deprived areas, but that is another day's work.