Phil Hogan (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Some groups expressed concern that because they are not listed in the Schedule to this Bill they were being excluded. That is not the case. All we have on the Schedule is the people with whom we are contracted. That does not exclude anybody in the future in terms of the relationships that will be developed between the community and voluntary sector and local government. We have the Father Seán Healy recommendations on that and the alignment process is ongoing in how we align the EU programmes and the local development company work with local government. I expect all this will conclude very shortly regarding the EU programmes, but we must comply with the bottom-up approach regarding EU programmes, and that is why a majority on the LCDCs must be from the community side.

Just because a group is not in this particular Schedule does not mean we are excluding it. We will have the opportunity to bring people together, but they will have to make choices between themselves. We cannot put every representative group on all these committees or we will have a very unwieldy structure, but we will do our best to put down guidelines for local authorities to comply with.

The legacy issues will have to be dealt with by the private companies. All of these local development companies have private company status now and all I can do is say what their overall financial provision should be. We had a debate last week about micromanagement. In this instance I have to leave it to the private companies to decide their priorities and how they will allocate the moneys and for what programmes. The completion of this programme means that a new programme will come into effect in 2015 and we will have to wait and see what the outcome will be in terms of the administrative and financial support they will have left during this year to see whether they will cease operations under this contract before we transfer the contract to the LCDCs. We will work through those issues with the people involved.

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