Mr. Shane Tiernan:

I identify with some of what the Deputy says. From my perspective, there has been a seismic shift in the last ten years in how rural local authorities are now building their towns and villages, connecting with communities and connecting with the citizens. Citizens now feel listened to and part of the vision of what we are doing.

There is a multitude of funding streams, even beyond what we are talking about here today, such as through housing, and the Fáilte Ireland funding. I have an example from recent days. We are in one of the just transition counties and we received funding through two streams - the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage and Pobal - to acquire a derelict filling station and an adjacent unfinished housing estate. It will effectively bring a derelict section of the town back into constructive social housing but there will also be a community hub in the old filling station. That is not even associated with the programmes we are talking about here today, but this is all part of this regeneration programme.

This is how the interlinkages work really well for us, because we are reaching out in all directions to bring the whole package together. Initiatives like Ireland's Hidden Heartlands, through Fáilte Ireland, again, are driving the towns and villages to be focused on these national policies that are going to attract tourism. That is shaping the businesses.

The Deputy mentioned living over the shop. The reality of it is in the smaller towns and villages a lot of the shops are not there to live over, and the challenge is what we do on the ground floor that makes the town and village vibrant in the centre. We can do all the work with the town teams. We can bring the infrastructure into place and add recreational facilities and make towns enjoyable, but we still need to incentivise enterprise to be something of a catch there, let it be hospitality or something like that. I still feel more is needed in that area to incentivise business generation in the town centres.

A lot of things have come together very well for us. Another thing I have to mention is the vision and commitment of the elected members in Roscommon. As a collective, they very much realised that some risk would have to be taken and unpopular decisions would have to be taken, but they have paid huge dividends for the towns and villages. That meant, for example, significant borrowings for Roscommon, in the order of €10 million at a point, to match-fund regeneration projects. That is a difficult decision for members because ultimately it hits the revenue budget in repayments and ultimately hits the payers of the county, but the long-term vision is paying dividends. We feel that collective approach with the executive has been a pivotal instrument in having success in some of the regeneration and bringing Roscommon to a new level. The excitement is palpable in Roscommon. In the towns and villages we have an enormous surge of communities that want to join our public participation network, PPN. We have in the order of 300 groups now that want to be part of it because they realise this is working. When I reach out beyond that, there are little schemes we do like graveyard committees and Tidy Towns teams, and other such funding streams. All of this is a collective feeding up into that greater picture.

We have even had funding on a bigger scale. The Minister for Rural and Community Development, Deputy Humphreys, is coming down in the next week or so to open three significant projects. We have the Castlerea food hub. This is bringing us into the area of business generation, where we work with the town team. We now have a brand new unit with seven food incubation units where new businesses are starting and launching their business in innovative food production facilities. The units are already practically booked out with demand to fill them. In Monksland, we created a life sciences hub through funding from the Department. Again, that is fantastic. We already have the top floor of that filled. We will support businesses that want to support the life sciences cluster that is in Monksland. I could keep talking because, as I said, we have so much going on, but I want to let my colleague speak.

In response to the Deputy, an awful lot of good things are coming together but the challenge is to keep that going. The problem for me now in a smaller local authority is, as I mentioned earlier, that if I want to do another big project it is going to be very difficult for me to find 20%. In recent calls, the requirement has been for 10% matched funding, which has been a huge help. However, even 10% of €6 million is €600,000, which for a small local authority with a revenue budget of €70 million that automatically pushes us right back down, maybe to a 0.5% rate increase or a 1% increase, and then we are perhaps knocking back the business a little bit. We need to think about all of that in future programmes for the smaller local authorities.

I want to stress that the foresight and initiative of the Government and what has happened through our colleagues in the Department has been game-changing for us. These are really fantastic policies that have brought real dividends to Roscommon.