Mr. D?nal Traynor:

On that point, this is something I have been harping on about for the last five or six years. I recall, when I joined this sector about 25 years ago, going into parochial halls at eight and nine o'clock at night and being entered into LEADER-facilitated community audits. They were like a wish list or the Santa letter for all the parents in the parish to set out what they would want to have in their parish if money was no object. That process has been done away with because the LEADER staff simply do not have the resources or budget to carry out those audits. The best projects we financed over the last two decades on the island resulted from those local community audits because they were what the people themselves knew they needed.

I will tie this into the Deputy's question on everybody always looking for European Union grants. Everybody wants to get their hands on free money. As Mr. Mulrooney alluded to earlier, it is fantastic if that aligns with the actual needs of the local parish. I always think of a scene in "Killinaskully" where the boys are up at the bar and Dan is saying he is going to get a grant. The two boys tell him that is great and ask him what he is getting the grant for. Dan is not fully sure what he is getting it for. His only purpose is to get the grant and ensure the Bally boys do not get it because if they did, they would be looking down their noses at the Killinaskully boys. There is a territorial competition where people have to get their hands on the money for any reason whatsoever.

We must be very wary of two things. One is external agencies coming in and suggesting they have buckets of cash and all people have to do is put in an application to get their hands on it. I wary of that approach because it normally involves getting bridging finance and also the matching term loan finance. The organisation probably does not want or need to take on the project. For this reason, when we talk about community loans we set a litmus test in which we ask whether, if the project goes down the tubes during a financial recession or Covid and we have to shake buckets at the crossroads, people will put their money in the buckets. They will only do that if the project is really needed and it came from the people themselves deciding it was what they required.

The other thing we must be wary of is people with a mid-life legacy crisis. This is where people get out of bed some morning and wonder who will remember them if they vanish from the face of the earth. They then decide they have to build a big white elephant in their name or their family's name that nobody really wants.

It all comes back to the need for these community audits that were all over the place 25 or 30 years ago. We need to do those again and start from scratch.