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

When we can travel again, I suggest that the Minister of State visits Clifden. There is a Pobal sub-office there that makes all the rural social scheme, RSS, and Tús payments and so on. The amount of travel amounts to one or two people going to Dublin occasionally, or that was the case before Covid and that has now probably proven to be an unnecessary journey. It is providing steady employment and wage packages to 30 or 40 people in Clifden. It is worth a visit because it shows that people who said that everything has to be centralised were wrong. One of the conditions under which Pobal got the pay-out of RSS and Tús was that it would be located in Clifden as part of the decentralisation programme. That has been very successful and the Minister of State should visit the office to see for himself an operation that works totally under the radar and has never had a complaint about payments. There have been many complaints about Pobal and its bureaucracy but there have been no complaints about payments under RSS and Tús. It is a model of where we should be going on an absolutely relentless, step-by-step basis. There is no need to be pushing people into overcrowded cities with overly costly rents when a lot of people would prefer to live in a rural community.