Mattie McGrath (Tipperary South, Independent)

I ask the Acting Chairman to allow me to continue. I know Deputy Buttimer is in a competition for the best heckler in this term of the Dáil and he is well on the way. He should allow me my opportunity and we will not interrupt him.

I am pleased the Minister, Deputy Hogan, is here. I am also pleased that he has shown such an interest in many of these important issues. Deputy Tom Hayes, my constituency colleague, and I had a discussion with the Minister. I am pleased he has responsibility for the areas of environment, community and local government because these responsibilities had been around the House, so to speak, and had been in disparate Departments. I am in favour of getting rid of some quangos because there are too many of them. I was delighted when the then Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds, secured all those billions in funding from Brussels. Pobal was initiated by his Minister for Finance at the time and it was set up specifically to streamline funding and to make it easier for community volunteers to access funds. I have been involved with many community projects and I know there must be complete accountability for every shilling expended. For example, I sat at a meeting which spent two hours trying to explain to Pobal an underspend of €20. This was six years' ago and I compare that practice to what happened in FÁS and many other organisations and in the same regard I note the €3.6 billion which was found and the good man who was trying to explain to the committee how this accounting error happened.

The dormant accounts fund supports many good projects such as the RAPID projects in south Tipperary and many others too numerous to mention. No project would have been possible without the unpaid volunteers who work throughout the country and we all know them. They make a community tick. Our new Uachtarán will be invited to visit many projects as did his four predecessors. He will be invited to open new and also splendidly refurbished buildings. However, even though funding was provided by the dormant accounts funding and by Pobal, the amount of red tape was a hell for volunteers. In many cases, I am convinced that the bureaucracy and red tape was invented to make work.

The McCarthy report recommended that the rural transport scheme be discontinued. I hope the Minister, Deputy Hogan, will never allow this to happen because one of the best rural transport projects is in a triangle of Kilkenny, Carlow and south Tipperary and McCarthy wanted to get rid of it. This was at a time when the Department of Transport was giving €11 million to Derry International Airport under some form of justification. I am not against such funding but McCarthy took the lazy man's view recommending the closure of this, that and the other, instead of taking a closer look at all these overlapping agencies.

The RAPID project in Tipperary has been an outstanding success in the three towns of Tipperary, Clonmel and Carrick-on-Suir. It is only a pity we did not have it in Cahir and Cashel but, none the less, County Tipperary did well out of it. I compliment all the county council officials, the local urban councils and the volunteer project groups, without whom we could not spend a penny of the funding. The volunteers provided all the ducks in a row and they had the responsibility of providing an annual audit and rightly so.

Deputy Healy referred to the Tipperary hostel project. I am very proud of that project which has received an investment of €5 million. I was at the official ceremony for turning the sod. I was there when the church was opened. It is a beautifully restored Famine church which was the work of craftsmen and FÁS trainees. Deputy Healy referred to discrepancies which arose in accounting and which I condemn out of hand because it is unacceptable. I sympathise with the staff. The project was closed down because an investigation was needed. At the time I spoke to the Minister responsible, former Deputy Pat Carey, several times. A Garda investigation is under way and Pobal is also conducting inquiries but the participants should not have been penalised for whatever happened at board level. They had to go to the Labour Court to get their redundancy entitlements but they had to wait too long. This must never happen again. As a result, those craftspeople were lost to us when they could have been subsumed into other community employment schemes. I hope the Minister will perform the opening ceremony when it is completed. It is a hostel project for the town of Tipperary which would provide low cost accommodation in what was a Famine house. A mass was said in the beautiful church that day and this church can also be used as a theatre. This was a fabulous project built with taxpayers' money and volunteer time and it cannot be left unfinished. I ask the Minister, once the investigations are finished, to see if funding to finish the project can be provided or at least to secure the building and protect it from vandalism. The sum of money gone astray in this scheme seems to be minuscule but all moneys must be accounted for.

I have an issue with the consultancy industry. It seems every project must have a consultant to draw up a plan. I worked with Sister Celestine from east Cork on the board of ICSH, Irish Council for Social Housing. She is a wonderful person, as are most of the sisters who give so much of their time to projects. They have no distractions. At one time, there were two vacancies on the board of Pobal. I indicated I would love to get inside the boardroom to see how it works and she also was interested in doing so. However, the public servants from other Departments did not permit it. I assure the Minister I do not mean to criticise civil servants. However, they told us we could not get on the board because we were recipients of money from Pobal. Of course, we were but we were not robbers. Everything we did was accounted for. If a decision came up for discussion concerning something in which the good sister and I were involved we could have abstained from the meeting. They pulled the wool over our eyes that day and got the position with Pobal.

I only wanted to get on board to play an honest part but I would have liked to have seen what went on. It became very bureaucratic and hard to deal with. I do not mean to pick on this point but when a payment would be approved for a project by an engineer, with everything signed off, audited and sent for final payment, nobody would sign the cheque. Contractors would be waiting for the money that had been promised to them. Most Deputies who are involved in such projects will understand my point. One would be trying to get the money after approval and authority were signed off. I was even on holidays at times when this occurred. It was not good enough to treat John or Mary Citizen, the volunteers and enablers like that. We will not come out of the morass we are in at present without them. We need that community spirit and initiative and we require it to be nurtured and propagated by the Government and Departments.

I know the Minister, Deputy Hogan, probably understands this better than I do. He has been around longer than I have and is a plain speaker. I realise he is not in favour of this and has certain views about giving responsibility back to the county councils. Although that is desirable it can also leave much to be desired. Some councils have not graced themselves in glory. I do not say they did anything wrong but we saw what the county development boards did regarding promoting projects and supporting community . There are also the enterprise boards and others which do outstanding work. There are good and bad systems.

I hope the Minister might meet people from the south Tipperary volunteer centre. I met some of them today. They are under serious pressure. They spoke of a cut of 10%, perhaps more. There is also the south Tipperary community platform, or forum, as exists in all counties. It does great work too. We cannot forget this. Someone put a ban on these people in my county because it was claimed they touched on politics. I know many people who entered politics because of that training ground and the work they did there. Who is better to be in politics? They are doers, shakers and movers. They may not speak in the media about what they do but they do the work on the ground and make an impact on people's lives, aid the marginalised and the elderly. They speak up for the elderly. I appreciate and respect this.

While we have our jostles and other issues on Tipperary County Council in regard to the north and south of the county, we will all come together to beat the Minister's county next year in hurling. The Minister snatched it from us last year but all is fair in, what shall I say-----

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