Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

While some of the Minister of State's points answered some of the points I made, she was told the SICAP would have to go out to tender, and that is why I did not raise the issue yesterday. Leader also had to be put out to tender last time, and we did so. The problem is this will never capture the public imagination because the devil is in the detail. The last time, the winning companies had to have a partnership board under EU rules because the decision making was staying with the board. While we could go to tender, the only people who could win the tenders were those who could prove they had a partnership board. Therefore, contrary to what can happen under SICAP, it was impossible for a private company with a non-partnership board to win the tender. It had to have community representatives such as social partners and statutory agencies. Although it must go out to tender, it does not have to do so in its current form.

I am disappointed in the reply, since I led with a detailed speech that dealt with many matters last night. The tendering process was not dealt with last night. People are being asked to tender for lots when they do not know what they are - "lot" is a technical term to describe the geographic area in which the service will be provided. The tendering companies are not being told what the breakdown of the lots within an area will be and, therefore, companies are submitting imaginary, fantasy tenders, trying to out-think the Department. This is the antithesis of openness and transparency. Last night, I suggested that rather than bulldoze ahead we pause for a moment. Reluctantly, I accept the LCDPs are there, under legislation passed by the House. Nevertheless, there are ever-growing problems with the mechanics of the process we are following.

As I said, the tender requirements will make it virtually impossible for the island companies to bid because they do not have the numbers of employees required by the tender documents to make a bid. We are talking about 3,000 people spread across four counties. In other cases, people do not know what they are bidding for because they do not know what the lots are. I have suggested we suspend the tendering process and, like in the game of "Monopoly", we return to "Go", and start again at the point of tendering. We should bring before an Oireachtas committee for detailed scrutiny the breakdown of the areas that will have companies and agree them before going to tender. Where necessary, we should allow cross-county companies to exist if that is the best arrangement for geographic reasons.

2 o’clock

We should sort out how many local community development committees will be used and that should not be the decision of either a majority of a council or a county manager. I have pointed out the very obvious case of County Galway. The east of the county has fertile and flat land, with English-speaking locals, whereas half the locals in the west of the county speak Irish and the terrain is mountainous and rough. The topography is as different as two parts of any county can be. The west's population ratio compared with that of the east is 9:30, and 50% of the people in the west of the county speak Irish. The county stretches from the River Suck in Ballinasloe through to Slyne Head, and when we tried to amalgamate the county, it did not work and the western part of the county lost out.

The Government should have decided to treat the west of Galway separately from the east. It is extraordinary as Galway is the only county in Ireland where one cannot drive from one part of the functional area to another - from the west to the east - without going through another local authority area. One either has to go through Galway city, which is a local authority in its own right, or through County Mayo. The other option is to take a boat. That is the extent of the geographic separation. Somebody made a decision that a county so big and diverse should be one LCDC, and I understand that is the preference of the county manager. If it went before councillors, why would the 30 vote against the nine? There is a successful company in Duhallow which has expanded into different counties. Why break this if it is working?

We must decide where the LCDCs and companies are before going to tender. With regard to tender documents, it is not always true that small is inefficient or does not suit and everything must be a standard size in this country. Counties are an asymmetrical group of historical entities but we still accept them for what they are. Companies delivering the services should be partnerships, and it is not good enough that we could wind up with service delivery for social inclusion, Leader, Tús or the rural social scheme that is owned by a private multinational company which has a headquarters anywhere it wants. The process would no longer be embedded in the community if such a company made a successful bid.

Many professional so-called charity companies and service providers have a particular expertise in filling out tender forms, and such expertise may be missing from some much more grounded companies. I used to rail against this when I was a Minister, as local people may not have the correct experience of filling out tender documents, which are getting ever more technical and complicated, to the satisfaction of the people who will adjudicate the tender on an objective scoring basis. I hated what I termed the essay question and I tried to eliminate them as far as I could when I was a Minister. The form would ask why a club needed a new dressing room or if an applicant could point out social exclusion in a community. Some people knew the formula and officials told me what was the correct information to give, such as that a club would give a football team free meals or gear. I have never seen a GAA club that would have a child without a pair of boots or a jersey if he or she wanted to play. I have more experience with GAA clubs than others but I presume the same applies to soccer and other clubs. Many applicants did not realise that this had to go on the form, which had to be filled with grá mo chroí stuff. The experts knew what to do and they kept winning the funding. This is likely to continue as some very professional outfits will outbid more grounded local organisations in a tendering process.

We must be careful about change. Although it is good when it improves matters, change merely for its own sake is not good. The Government made promises about quangos and so on and it is performing optical illusions to prove it has eliminated some of them. That is instead of admitting that changing certain bodies which it looked to amalgamate or eliminate would not save a significant amount of money or bring improvement. For example, it took a long struggle to persuade the Minister responsible for the Gaeltacht not to try to amalgamate An Coimisinéir Teanga. I am glad that after 10,000 people took to the streets, he changed his mind, as there were very good reasons we set up that office. We looked at the other option initially and we decided for very good reasons that have now been accepted by the Minister that it was not a good arrangement. For example, the Coimisinéir Teanga once found against the Ombudsman with regard to language issues.

There is a fair bit of change taking place for change's sake and it is not necessarily delivering on a coherent vision. We had come to the idea that if local services are provided at one remove from the State, rather than having a plethora of companies operating in the same area, as we had in the past, one company should provide the full suite of services so that the citizen would know where to go. Deputies and even the Minister of State have experience of people coming to a clinic asking whether there are five enterprise agencies from which they might get a few bob. Instead, if people are looking for an enterprise grant, they should be sent to one agency with a full suite of options, taking in sites, grants and so on. We wanted to create a process involving all services, taking in rural transport, Tús and the rural social scheme. I would have eliminated the 1,000 FÁS companies as well, leaving only 53 limited companies with employment responsibilities rather than 1,000 community employment companies. We would have rationalised the process.

Many people know that to provide good rural transport services, a Tús scheme can be used, along with a community employment and rural social scheme. The process could be brought together to provide good value for money. It seems that the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government is now saying that it does not want to know about anything involving the Departments of Social Protection or Health. That means there is no joined-up thinking or a whole-of-government view. When we were in Government I attended meetings with departmental officials, and as there is a natural tendency to look after the interests of a Department, I tried to remind them that the Government was to serve the people and not the interests of individual Departments. The public cannot understand Departments at war and selfishly fighting over their domain rather than considering the big picture and the good of society. We were trying to implement a grand vision, with a wide range of services provided in each area by a locally based company with a local board and representation, complete with a sense of ownership.

As in any system, such as local authority elections, there were aspects of the way the boards were put together that I was not happy with. There were issues to be dealt with between the voluntary and community sectors. They could have been honed. If I was doing it again I would lay down stricter guidelines to ensure true community participation and that certain stronger voices in the community sector did not dominate. Everybody should go back to the beginning of this tendering process and reorganise it, having discussed it with the appropriate Oireachtas committee. We should then move forward together on this process in a way that protects the community ethos in the delivery of services, something many of us fear for.

Last night, the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government said: "The system also proposes to delegate the administrative checks required to verify expenditure to an independent entity with the capacity to ensure these checks are carried out to a consistently high standard at all times". Are we being told that for the LEADER companies the inspection regime is being taken out of the Department and given to a private entity? Perhaps the Minister of State would ask the Minister to give me a specific reply.

I welcome the reference made by the Minister of State at the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government, Deputy Jan O’Sullivan, to the Minister’s interest in the islands. He has expressed that to me. The present tendering arrangement, however, is very island-unfriendly. I hope the Minister will decide to pull the islands out of the present tendering process because there is no way under the present criteria they can enter that process on a level playing pitch with the much larger companies around the country.

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