Charlie McConalogue (Donegal, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I felt very much like the goalkeeper in the contest for a while when most of the play is up the other end of the pitch. The Deputy rightly outlined the LSSIF. It was an important piece relating to the overall funding infrastructure that the State provides. Prior to 2019, there had not been anything filling that space. There were many projects of a reasonable scale throughout the country that were not able to proceed because they did not have any funding. The first round was in 2019. We had a second round more recently with €177 million awarded.

On how we go forward, we would like to be able to run that scheme again with a further round in a shorter timeframe than happened last time which was five years. This will be dependent on how much funding we receive under the national development plan. Many of those projects, such as Drogheda United F.C., were worthy projects that were not funded because the demand well exceeded the supply of funding even though it was strong funding. The priority in the short term is working with those 33 projects that were funded to make sure they can move on. The capacity for a reserve list and for there to be any meaningful funding or any movement on those projects that were not successful will depend on there being available funding for that. The first priority is to identify if there will be any funding. The key to that is working with those that were funded to move them on and monitor that closely. If funding becomes available, we will look then at a reserve list regarding other potential projects. Any reserve list would be redundant in the absence of any additional funding becoming available.