John Browne (Wexford, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Before he goes, he should tell the people employed by WLD and the other local development companies throughout the country whether their jobs are safe and what will happen when the funding runs out and there is a break between the old scheme being wound up and the new scheme coming on stream. There will probably be a three or four month time lag. What will happen to these people? Will they continue to be paid?

Communities will lose out on funding leveraged by WLD to complete community projects and deliver programmes and services to which Wexford County Council does not have access. This would be a major blow to communities in Wexford, which in 2013 benefited from an additional €3.1 million in funding leveraged by WLD. In 2014 or 2016, will there be €3.1 million available? I doubt it, and if so it will probably go to private enterprise or some other area through tendering for the schemes.

The powers that be and Brussels, as the previous speaker said, regard this country's model, which was established by former Minister, Deputy Ó Cuív, and others and is being destroyed by the Minister, Deputy Hogan, as the way forward. We are abandoning a scheme that is recognised Europe-wide as the model for other countries. We are putting it under the local authorities, and we all know what happens when they get hold of things. Many years ago when I was a councillor and the Minister was a member of Kilkenny County Council, the development projects were within local authorities, and it did not work very well. We established the county enterprise boards and local development companies because it was recognised that it was not working as it should have within local authorities. Local authority members and officials see their role as overseeing such matters as roads, planning and waste management, and they are not in the business of creating or developing jobs, other than protecting their own jobs within the structure of local authorities. That is why I am afraid the Minister's proposal will seriously damage the future of local development companies.

The Leader companies are local action groups which were established in 1991 to promote the development of their own specific rural areas. If one travels to any rural community, one will see the tremendous work that has been carried out by local groups. Local groups became active, got involved in working with the local development companies and had a sense of purpose, moving forward and doing things for their communities. I fear this will be lost because we have already received a communiqué from the Minister's office - I do not know if he has read it yet - saying that when the new county councils are established this week they need not nominate people for local development companies.

There were members of Wexford County Council in the previous local development companies and it worked very well. Why is the Minister sending a diktat that elected members of local authorities should not be on the new local development companies? We have seen too much of that, with Deputies and councillors precluded from sitting on certain boards. The Wexford local development committee has no Fianna Fáil councillor, only Fine Gael councillors, but it is working very well. Will the Minister explain why he is sending a diktat to the county manager not to put councillors in local development companies? It is not right, because the councillors were elected by the people for the people, and surely they have a right to make contribution to whatever new board structure the Minister is talking about.

The Minister comes from a rural constituency, Carlow-Kilkenny, is a former local authority member and is very aware of what happens on the ground and how successful the local development companies were under their own steam when they were autonomous. While he says the local authority will not have much power over them and that they are only being housed within the local authority structure, from what I hear, the county managers and officials do not think that way. We have a new county manager who sees himself as the driver of this new company the Minister is establishing, and this is where it will fall down. I predict that in a year or 18 months Wexford County Council or another council will be left short by the Government for road works or other local authority schemes and the county manager will propose to take €1 million from the fund the Minister of the day has allocated. We will have fireworks when this happens because we will see that the Minister's decision was not in the right direction and was not going to help job creation and community development.

When the Minister replies I ask him to specifically state that the moneys allocated to local authorities for this project be ring-fenced. County managers should not if they can get county managers on-side be able to hive off money for normal council projects.

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