Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Bearing in mind the Chairman's warning about timekeeping I will keep my praise to a minimum, in order to fit more questions in. It is not because I do not find the document worthy of praise. I do and I compliment the Minister, her Department and everybody who worked on it. There is much in it that is new and much that was already announced but it is good to see it all together in one place so we have a coherent and joined-up strategy. I commend that work.

As I said, this questioning is not about being negative at all. It is about drawing out more of what I find good in the document. The town centres first approach has been referenced widely in this document and elsewhere within Government policy but it is necessary to clarify our thinking on it. Are we speaking strictly about the Scottish model of town centres first? We need a strong definition of what it is we are talking about. The interdepartmental working group is going to report back later this year. If the Minister has a hand in that at all, I urge that that report come back to us sooner rather than later, particularly in the context of framing the next budget. If we are making town centres first a central part of our thinking about our rural future, we need to clarify what exactly we mean by that, in order that we can fund it and make it happen going forward.

I commend the bottom-up approach and I note the inclusion of the public participation networks, PPNs, the local community development committee, LCDC, structures, the rural ideas forum and the rural youth assembly. These are all good initiatives. Cappoquin in my own constituency is a good example. The Cappoquin Regeneration Company was set up under the town and village renewal scheme. It had good input from the collaborative town centre health check programme, which is run out of the Heritage Council. It would be interesting to fund that model to allow more towns because it provides exactly the forum about which the Minister is talking. Local communities know their communities best and that collaborative town centre health check model is a good one that I would like to see funded as we move forward in this regard.

On tackling dereliction and vacancy in our town centres, yesterday's announcement about those landmark buildings was exciting and welcome. However, we need a little more detail on how we go about this.

As we know the problem of dereliction and vacancy has proven to be somewhat intractable. I would like more detail on how we are going about that. We must incentivise people, especially younger people, to move back into our towns. We have a help-to-buy scheme. I would love to see a help-to-renovate scheme that helps young couples in particular close the gap between the market value and the cost of doing up that house on the main street. There are all the heritage concerns that come into it and make it expensive. As these properties can be money pits, we need to help people to make that decision.

On transport issues, we probably need to set out more specific objectives in terms of thresholds in population. This has been tried in the UK, where any town with a population above 1,000 people, or whatever, gets a public transport service and they can hang their hat on that.

I very much welcome that the sustainable development goals are linked to each of the strategic objectives. All Government policy should include that, going forward. I ask that the Minister's Department dig down deeper into the 169 sub-targets in the sustainable development goals because that is where the rubber really meets the road when it comes to vindicating those goals. It would be really helpful and would really bring the policy to life and might even inform the implementation of the policies.

I would like to flag a huge opportunity for our Gaeltacht areas stemming from this commitment to decentralisation. We know that with the Bille na dTeangacha Oifigiúla (Leasú) that is coming through the roghchoiste na Gaeilge at the minute, we are going to commit to a 20% recruitment target for those who are fluent in Irish. Decentralising some of our services to our Gaeltacht communities has huge potential to help us answer our rural strategies but also our language strategies. I therefore ask the Minister to consider that.

Finally, there is a small loophole in the rural regeneration and development fund, RRDF, in that there must be an existing town centre. To get constituency-based for a moment, our local Gaeltacht area, An Rinn, has applied for the RRDF but cannot get it because it does not have an existing town centre. There are other communities like that so it might be something to look at. An Rinn is a very dispersed community so it does not have what would be defined as a town centre. That is a small loophole and I ask the Minister to take it under advisement. I thank the Chairman for his discretion.