Brendan Smith (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail)

There has always been cooperation between the local authorities and the county enterprise boards and an exchange of staff between them. Generally the county manager has been the chairman of the county enterprise board. In my county, the county enterprise board has been very successful but the value of the boards has never been properly recognised. There are enterprises from my county that are multinational corporations that started out as small enterprises with initial support coming from the former country development boards, as they were then.

The restructuring I advocated when I was in government was that the LEADER programme and the former partnership boards should have been subsumed into the county enterprise boards. Does the Minister of State envisage a substantial proportion of the funding from the county enterprise boards will come from the revenue of the local authorities? That is a concern in rural counties.

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