Michael Healy-Rae (Kerry South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Local development companies work closely with county councils, but they operate in a different manner, as acknowledged by the reports. The retention of their autonomy from councils or any State body in facilitating communities to articulate their needs is imperative. There is a vague statement to the effect that the role and functions assigned to SECs should reduce the need for State representation on the boards of a range of local development entities and-or allow the phasing out of certain structures. This appears to suggest that the Government or its civil servants want to retain local development entities to do the difficult work with communities, for example, the night work and the donkey work, while funding will go to local authorities or, to be clear, the local county managers.

The most devastating element of the proposals suggests that the bottom-up approach will be dismantled.

Volunteers will be disenfranchised, disempowered, disengaged, disillusioned and disgusted, and would most certainly walk. It will take some time for a strong and well-resourced local community and rural development sector to get going again but it will happen because Government will not stop the people on the ground from working to better themselves, their families and their communities. The approach seems to be that local government and the local authority are broken, so we must fix local development. If we kill the roots, the tree will die, and the roots of community development are the communities.

I salute all the people who work in local development in all the different schemes, whether rural social schemes or otherwise, and all the different community groups which organise people to work on the ground. They have served our communities very well. I hope that in his endeavours, the Minister will not break something which is working. He is trying to fiddle with this in the same way as he has done with the town councils. In the past the rural train network was dismantled and the tracks were taken up but people now see that was a mistake. People will look back on the Minister's record when he is in Europe and will remember what he did on the ground. If the Minister stayed away from this and left it alone, it would be fine. Unfortunately, he is the Minister and we have to let him do what he is going to do.

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