Thomas Gould (Cork North Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

When I was on Cork City Council, it was paying, let us say, on €100,000, what started off at €7,000 and rose over the years because it was originally interest-only repayment and then the local authority had to pay capital. It could have been the bones of €1 million. Other local authorities must be in the same position. It goes back to a point Deputy Cian O'Callaghan made earlier in relation to local property tax. The Minister is taking hundreds of thousands of euro out of the finances of local authorities to pay interest or debts on land they were told to purchase by central government and that they are sitting on now. That money should be spent on parks, public roads, public lighting and pedestrian crossings. I will put it this way. I was a councillor in 2009 and no traffic calming measures went into local authority estates unless the funding came nationally. That is 13 years. There must be 20 or 30 areas in my constituency that have been waiting on traffic calming measures. With the local authority, there is underfunding. That same local authority has paid the bones of hundreds of thousands of euro on debt on land that it was told to purchase by central government.