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

If there is a cross-departmental group chaired by the Minister, it must be totally focused on these highly deprived areas and making sure they are all pulling their weight. I have come to admire self-help within communities. One thing struck me in the past.

I remember there was discussion about a certain very deprived community about which there was a lot of publicity, and the first thing was that they were going to empower the people. I said they should hang on and not treat the people as fools because they are as intelligent as you and I, they are as smart and worldly-wise as you and I, but they just did not get a chance. What RAPID tried to do was put the people living there in control. One of the essentials of RAPID was that the area implementation team, AIT, had people who had to live in the local authority estates of that particular RAPID area, not people coming in from outside, social workers and so on, who are all very worthy and much-needed, but for the first time it was trying to say that self-development is much more sustainable, so we would facilitate self-development.

I have seen both methods and, in my view, one reason, with limited resources, rural Ireland is relatively successful is that it is the community that does all of the big events from the inside. As to the idea of bringing in experts from outside, they would just laugh and say “We can do it.” We were trying to bring that model to people to encourage them, to let them know they were in control and give them the money, and to show them that their say-so was the ultimate thing in regard to spending the money. I do not know whether it was working because it did not last long enough but I have a suspicion that when we have the statistics, we will find out that what we have now is not working, even though we have a very buoyant economy which should be lifting all boats.