Timmy Dooley (Clare, Fianna Fail)

I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this important debate. There has been a suggestion that my party, or this side of the House generally, has sought to streamline the debate into an urban versus rural divide. That is not the case at all. We are concentrating, in this motion, on the impact of the budget on rural pursuits and the rural way of life. In doing so we do not deny its significant impact on urban life. I am sure we will have an opportunity to deal with that in due course.

As my colleagues have identified, the budget includes cuts to services that will impact substantially on those living in rural areas. The first that comes to mind - incidentally, it is one which bridges the gap between urban and rural - is the reduction in funding for community employment schemes. I had an opportunity at the weekend to meet with various people involved in this sector, including those who are attempting to run the schemes. It is clear that 99.9% of them are run exceptionally well and in a highly efficient manner. These scheme benefit both their communities and those who participate in them.

I am confused as to what exactly is being reviewed in respect of the community employment sector. The Minister, Deputy Burton, has made several statements, indicating on the one hand that there will be a review and, on the other, that no schemes will be shut down. I did not think there was a proposal that any would be shut down unless they had failed to meet their audit requirements, as was always the case. What is of greatest concern to the people trying to operate these schemes is the proposed reduction in the funding per participant of €1,000. Many of these schemes have already made payments towards the services they will provide next year by way of the purchase of materials. I visited one scheme at the weekend where the people running it had chosen to purchase certain goods and materials in advance on account of the Government's plan to increase the VAT rate by two percentage points. They are being penalised for using their heads, being now in an uncertain state as to whether the funding will be made available to pay for those purchases.

A red herring was put forward by some backbenchers on the Government side to the effect that people were not being trained to an appropriate level under these schemes or that some of the money was being lost in the system. That is not correct. For the past five years, as I understand it, if the sum apportioned to a participant was not spent on the individual concerned, that money was automatically returned. In other words, there was a safeguard in place which prevented commingling of the training pool. As such, a level of efficiency was built into the system.

What is of most concern now is the capacity of these schemes to continue their work without the materials grant. Some of the schemes with which I am familiar used it for the provision of bus services for people with disabilities, for example. If those schemes are no longer operational, it will fall to the Health Service Executive to provide that service. I do not want to get into the cuts to the health budget, some of which we accept are necessary. However, the reality in this case is that a service was being provided in an efficient way, through community employment schemes - a service, moreover, which the State has an obligation to provide. The schemes effectively provide cheap labour, offering service delivery in an holistic, community-based way which benefits everybody who participates, including the recipient of the service. Yet, for the sake of a few million euro, the Government is potentially dismantling an entire architecture that has taken a great deal of time to build up.

Will the Minister clarify whether or not the saving which has been identified in the Budget Statement is now off the agenda and will be restored to the Estimates for the coming year? If not, will he give us some indication of whether the proposed savings will be achieved through the elimination of some schemes or by forcing schemes to take cuts to the extent that they will be unable to continue to provide the relevant service? Unless he does that, I will have the same issues this weekend when I meet representatives of the schemes, as will Government backbenchers. The types of platitudes trotted out last weekend - that there will be a review and that no schemes will be closed - are nothing I have not heard before. I was that soldier in the past. We rallied against that evasion and sought a straight and honest statement. When we got it and delivered it, we sometimes suffered the consequences of doing so, but at least we were up-front in explaining people's situation and allowing them to plan, albeit in a lesser way

As it stands, we are left with a hiatus where people do not know what they will be doing next year, whether they will be able to collect the goods from the hardware store, whether they should begin planning, or whether they should simply pull down the shutter, sit in a corner and say, "To hell with it, we will get the few bob anyway and there is no need to bother looking at the output". That will hollow out the outstanding work that was done in bringing these schemes to such a level that they are now an integral part of communities throughout the State.

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