Mr. Fintan O'Brien:

There are a number of issues and I will try to cover the ones that fall within our bailiwick. The Deputy started by talking about the challenges of rural communities and what may or may not be unique to Ireland. We are well aware of that. At international level there is quite a body of evidence we are trying to lean on, and that underpins our approach to having the OECD come in.

They will bring in peer reviewers from other countries to look at how much worse we are doing, and bring that expertise into it. We are also trying to engage more at the EU level. The Deputy is equally right when he says that it is not simply about what is happening at an international level and we should not lean entirely on that. There is an element of the Irish experience and the Irish challenges but, even within that, it is broken down a lot more because within different rural communities in Ireland there are different challenges, priorities and approaches. That is what we are really trying to get at when we talk about town centre first being based on a local place-based approach.

It would be very difficult for three of us to sit in an office in Dublin and say: "Here is the top-down approach to how you fix all problems in rural Ireland." That would be very challenging. The idea of the town teams, the regeneration officers, and the role of the local authorities is to try to plug us into that local difference. That is quite a challenge but we think we are making progress in that regard. The challenge we face at the moment is to balance all of those.

The Deputy mentioned properties and local authorities. My colleagues in the local authorities will probably take that up. From our point of view, we are trying to work with local authorities from our area of responsibility to try to give a few more tools in relation to that. We will see funding for the purchase of those types of properties featuring more in our schemes under the town and village renewal scheme and the URDF. In the past couple of years we had a building acquisition measure, which proved quite popular across the country as well. The focus for two years has been on cinemas, Garda stations and FCA halls and many different types of building, that are strategically important in towns. We have been giving funding to local authorities to purchase them and they are later developed as community facilities.

In relation to local authority borrowing and financing, I will just pick up on what my colleague from Roscommon said as well. We are aware of that challenge. I would probably say that it is not an evenly distributed challenge across local authorities in terms of the finances available. We have been discussing that quite a lot in our engagement with the CCMA. We meet its rural development committee every quarter. We also have discussions on it with directors of service. We have responded in places on that. For example, in our schemes in the last year there has been a more favourable co-financing arrangement for the local authorities in the north-west region. It is important to take account of that. It has been well received.

We are very much aware of the number of increasing demands on local authorities, so we are trying our best to work in collaboration with them. The town regeneration officers, TROs, are a big part of that. We see a massive role for them in terms of linking things together with the local authorities and the town teams. They go back to the local authorities and then back to the centre as well. That, hopefully, will help there as well. We are in discussion with the CCMA at the moment as well on resources. Our shared challenge is delivery under our range of schemes. How do we make sure that we are resourcing that properly within local authorities because both the local authorities and ourselves are very much focused on delivery? It is not simply about announcing that a scheme is open, it is about the delivery of projects on the ground. I think we are making good progress on that but it is certainly something on which we will be in ongoing discussion with the local authorities.

In relation to Our Rural Future, the Deputy mentioned the input from other Departments. That is a key feature of it. Our role is to put a coherence, framework and a joint effort on it as best we can. The cross-governmental piece has always been a challenge. My father retired from the Civil Service in 2001 and he was talking about the cross-governmental challenges a generation before me and it is still there. We are making progress. Our Rural Future sits in the centre of that. What is in that policy is a real focus for us in terms of momentum and coherence. We spend a lot of time engaging directly with Departments on their actions and where they fit in with the wider rural piece. We are trying to present that as a joint win and a joint development. We are trying to put the pieces of the jigsaw together. That is challenging but I think we are making progress in terms of presenting that coherence on a cross-departmental basis. That is always there. For us, it is then about how we move that into a successor policy for Our Rural Future, and make sure that the key relationship with Departments remains a part of it and that it does not become an exercise in sending around progress reports every three months and everyone in the Department groans and goes: "I can't believe we have to put this out again." It is about getting engagement. For us, it has really been about the one-to-one relationship we have with Departments. They have been buying in, which is fantastic. That is pretty much all on my side. I will pass over to colleagues.