Dr. Breandán Ó Caoimh:

I second Mr. Kehoe's point on the importance of the community development approach and working with the project promoters. I have tracked the LEADER investments and the journeys the project promoters have been on. They may initially need some training, a feasibility study or a small technical support grant. Having that relationship with the LEADER officer is really important in their journey to becoming much more sustainable.

In response to Deputy Hayes's questions, and I thank him for them, I talked about farming with nature. There is a lot of emphasis now on farming for nature, but I prefer the term farming with nature, with biodiversity and with our natural resources. Farmers are providing those ecological services but are not being sufficiently paid for the public good they are providing.

There are various schemes in operation, such as the LIFE programmes. I am doing an evaluation at the moment on the Corncrake LIFE initiative. The corncrake is of course symbolic of rural Ireland and our summers. It is an iconic bird. That scheme is coming to an end. Some of its elements will be taken up in other schemes but there is a stop-start nature to the schemes. That is very difficult for farmers when they are trying to plan long term. Farming should be done on an intergenerational basis. We need to move away from the start-stop way of doing things so there is continuity in the supports for farming with nature. We also need to involve the wider rural community outside the farm gate.

Deputy Hayes also asked about the mapping of investments in rural areas. Mr. Kehoe is quite correct in his response on the monitoring of LEADER. I can tell the Deputy exactly how much LEADER funding has gone into every town and village in Wexford, Roscommon and every other county, but can I present the same data in respect of Enterprise Ireland, IDA Ireland, Fáilte Ireland and other agencies? Where is their investment going? This is public funding. The Deputy mentioned foreign direct investment and other private investments. Those will not happen because private investors will not take the risk and they cannot take the risk until the public sector makes the investment first. We saw that with roads, infrastructure, electricity and so on. We need to map the totality of what each public sector body is doing, break that down geographically and refine that.

On the other question on the alternatives to our 16th and 17th century colonial boundaries and so on, I refer the Deputy to the work of one his colleagues. He was a Senator at the time, Deputy Malcolm Byrne. He is now a TD. He did a piece of research that looked at the way local government is organised in Ireland at some of the alternatives around the municipalities as they have in other European countries. Within the pre-existing county structures, one can provide for a much more localised system of government. The French system is very much based on the mayor. In the other systems, there are citizen juries and so on in Germany and the Alpine states. There are templates from other European countries and other OECD members that we can look at.

The Deputy referred to the success of Westport. It had a town council, a town architect, a vibrant civic society, a lot of community development and local government through the town council working with the business community, schools and community and voluntary bodies. That is the type of model and approach that the local development companies are promoting, but we need to invest much more in that, do so much more universally and sustain it.