Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will come back in there. There are town teams in every town as the Deputy knows. We have appointed town regeneration officers. They are meant to look at the towns and engage with communities and businesses and help them to develop their plans for their particular town. The officers are in place now. We are very much about a bottom-up approach. Sometimes I know local authorities employ consultants to engage with communities and some of them are very good. However, it is important there is real engagement. There is no point in a consultant coming in with a report that has been written for some other town and kind of imposing it. I am very much against that. You have to get in there and you have to understand the demands of communities. We want to help them. I am always saying this. We want to help them to realise their vision for their area. They know what they want. You know what you need in your home area. I do not know that. It is about getting that real engagement with people. I hate to hear some people coming back and saying they did not really get a chance. That is not what we are about. We want to see that with the local authorities. The LEADER programme is very good at building capacity within communities so they can have that conversation and identify what they want.

On the community centre investment fund, that was a very popular fund. I had €20 million for it and that is why I have moved money into it. We have allocated funding for 862 projects to the value of €45.8 million. There are three different categories. That is the existing one. It is so popular that I have to talk to the Department of public expenditure and reform when it comes to the national development plan to see if I can get more money. It really has been a huge success. They are delivering. The communities are getting out there and getting the projects delivered on the ground. They are doing their build and their extension. A lot of the money was to upgrade heating, put in solar panels, make it more efficient and reduce the running cost by bringing in different forms of solar energy, insulation and so on. It is going well.

We announced the new build measure. We have an allocation in the budget for that. We have 22 projects applied for. That has closed - the one that is open now is the rural regeneration scheme. We have projects to the value of €70 million looking for grants from us of €59 million. We are going through them at the minute. We have to assess them and we will see where we go with that. We are assessing the 22 applications. It is expected the announcement will be made on the successful projects in quarter 1 of 2024. I think the community centre investment fund is a very good fund but I would like to see this one a bit further down the line before I announce another one. I think that is all the questions covered.