Paul Gogarty (Dublin Mid West, Independent)

Fáilte ar ais chuig Ms Coughlan. I apologise for being in and out of the meeting. While I did not hear the presentations, I read through them while others were making their contributions. There were a couple of points. Some of it is revisiting what we discussed with Ms Coughlan at an earlier point. My first question is slightly slanted. Does Ms Coughlan think the regions are makey-uppy? This goes back to the time when there were eight regions, and then two larger regions in 2014. Is there a risk that with the centralisation of cohesion funding, if it is called a new region, Ireland will be back to being one region? Will there be tokenisation of the work that the regional assemblies are currently doing, and they would be powerless to have an input? Basically, does Ms Coughlan think the three regions will exist with the centralisation of cohesion funding? I know the assemblies are fighting that battle.

Mr. Healy mentioned the lack of a plan B. Is there scope to further regionalise and perhaps go back to eight regions in that scenario so that each group of counties could have its own specific voice heard in a more focused way in terms of accessing what might be national funding? We want to have decision-making and the input of funding at the lowest level possible. Everyone here has talked at different stages about the fact that local government is very centralised. However, the assemblies are dealing with that, and we have to live in the real world.

In the context of what exists now, what is the legal barrier preventing every one of the regional authorities from controlling the funds directly, rather than having them channelled through, say, the southern region? Was this a bureaucratic decision? Was this imposed by Europe in some way, shape or form? Was a logic articulated at some stage? That is where I am coming from on that point.

I do not have much else to say as I want to give the witnesses time to speak. President Tütt articulated that from her perspective, and I think the witnesses will agree, she does not like what is coming and is fighting a rearguard action against it. When the committee members ask what we can do, we can, of course, put down parliamentary questions. Can the witnesses suggest any specific things that we should be asking the Minister when appearing before this committee, for example? Are there any pointed questions that we could ask?