Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail)

The Chair is absolutely right on community centre investment. It has been one of the best programmes from the Department. Many of those community centres go back. I do not think there is anyone old enough in the room to remember AnCO. They were developed by communities in the late 1970s and 1980s and they had not been spent on. To give an example of the impact, the Minister, Deputy Humphreys, announced 861 centres and €45.8 million investment in 2022 and 750 of those projects are completed, three years on. There are good reasons for most of the others but it shows the money gets spent. In 2023, we moved focus to new builds. Many communities, particularly new communities, are without centres and we were able to announce €30 million for 12 community centres. Some are going to tender at the moment. This year the Minister of State, Deputy Buttimer, and I announced €33.9 million for 774 community centres. They are driving on. They really came to the fore this January and February during Storm Éowyn. We saw the importance of having a physical infrastructure as community scaffolding. I thank everybody who stepped up. We are in a budget negotiation and an NDP negotiation for community centre refurbishment and new builds. Separate from that, I am looking at how we can support community centres to be a hub in the context of potential weather events.

On women's sheds, the Minister of State and his officials are negotiating with them. We can work with the men's sheds because there is one national organisation and we liaise with it on funding. We are working closely and have been for some time to establish a national co-ordinating organisation. It is not that we do not want to invest the money; we want to invest it in a way that will get directly to them. Many of them have received funding through the local enhancement programme but we continue to work on getting the structure to put the funding in place.

Through the Tidy Towns programme, we fund the national Tidy Towns awards along with SuperValu. The unit in my Department is working phenomenally hard at the moment because adjudicators are wandering the country doing the assessments. They are lurking around the place. The small team in the Department does amazing work on this competition. It does not just happen. There is a huge scaffolding around it. I acknowledge SuperValu's partnership with it as well. Through the local enhancement programme, the Minister of State announced funding for a number of local Tidy Towns groups recently. We also did Ireland's Best Kept Town, which is the all-island version of Tidy Towns, two weeks ago. I commend everybody involved in that.