Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

As the Deputy knows, I always look out for value for money. The Deputy mentioned schemes I was particularly associated with setting up, of which I will take three examples. The rural social scheme, which costs €7,000 more per year than keeping the same person on unemployment benefit or farm assist, is incredibly good value for money in terms of the amount of work done. The report I launched recently at the National Ploughing Championships will testify that the payback from the scheme is a large multiple of the amount of money we put in. In addition, when one considers the social benefit of providing these people with employment and preventing them from living a lonely life without any outside activity other than farming, one must conclude the scheme is a success.

Because of the CLÁR programme, there are houses in rural Ireland that have water from group schemes; we were willing to provide a top-up to prevent people in rural Ireland from paying inflated costs for water, and that was justified. I have been very strict with local authorities, as the Deputy knows. In his own county I refused to pay because the local authority did the work first and then applied for the grant. Anybody who tells me it is not a worthy social objective to give high-quality piped water to the houses of rural Ireland does not understand the problem.

The local improvement scheme for roads project has also been good value, although I have questioned the prices given by local authorities and so on. We do our best to monitor these matters, but I believe it is value for money. If we move on to rural recreation-----

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