Dr. Breandán Ó Caoimh:

I might have been an officer of the GAA - I was treasurer of a club - but I certainly was not much good on the pitch so I will leave the hurling and the football to the hurlers and the footballers. The GAA looks after its own business. I was making the point more generally in the way we approach rural development.

Deputy Aird has a lot of experience in that. I was very struck by his references to the railways. When you think of our climate emergency and the need for us to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and giving people a choice as to how they get about, if we had kept the railways people would have so many choices. We would not have as many environmental problems and we would have a much more vibrant and living countryside today if people back in the 1960s and 1970s had the type of vision the Deputy has articulated.

I was also taken by his point on learning from what happens. The Deputy has insights and knowledge but that knowledge needs to be disseminated. I mentioned the work I do in Canada. There are books written about what is happening in rural development so that people beyond the likes of Deputies Healy-Rae and Aird and so on really know what is happening.

I refer the committee back to the 1994 evaluation of the first LEADER programme that Brendan Kearney and his colleagues edited - that type of documenting of what Ms Earley, Mr. Kehoe and their colleagues the length and breadth of Ireland are doing. We need to invest in telling that story, putting that narrative out there and recording the totality of what they are doing, not just through LEADER and SICAP. I am glad to hear Ms Earley articulating the importance of the rural social scheme as well. It is about the totality of the package and how each of the elements link together.

As the committee acknowledged this morning, all of this is happening but, in many respects, it is happening despite the context, the cutbacks in funding, the challenges with the Common Agricultural Policy and the Local Government Reform Act 2014 which shoehorned local development in under the remit of local authorities. Local authorities are very good at what they do and they need to have more autonomy and resources in order that they can do things like providing water services and infrastructure, both of which were mentioned. However, giving them oversight of local community development is inappropriate because that stifles creativity at local level. It has also put a layer of bureaucracy on top of project promoters who are trying to develop SMEs and other projects in rural Ireland.

Certainly, there needs to be a repeal of the 2014 legislation. The Government has indicated it will repeal elements around the re-establishment of the town councils and I welcome that. It is very good for counties like Monaghan which had a number of town councils. For towns such as those in County Limerick which did not have town councils, there is a need for town councils to be provided so that we have a much more even approach to the geography and governance of rural towns. The 2014 legislation was enacted without due consultation or the type of process the committee was doing here this morning and has been doing for Our Rural Future. We need a Green Paper before a White Paper or legislation is produced, so that it has stakeholder input. That needs to inform the repeal process over the coming months.