John Deasy (Waterford, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

There is a growing realisation that the take-up of the Living City initiative has not been good so far. The Minister for Finance described it recently as "miniscule".

From what I have read, there seems to be a movement in the direction of extending this to towns in some way. I want to put forward another suggestion, which is to extend the initiative specifically to the counties of Waterford and Limerick. This is for a number of reasons, one being that they were the two locations picked when the Living City initiative was devised and that choice was based on levels of deprivation in both cities.

We should not give up on this scheme. I believe it will be successful if it is varied in some manner. Much effort has been put into it and I believe it will contribute to heritage-led renewal and economic recovery. My guess is that the massive success of the home renovation scheme has affected the take-up of the Living City initiative in some respects. Where I see a difficulty with extending this scheme to towns, as the Heritage Council has proposed, is due to the incredibly lengthy process with the European Commission the Department has dealt with during the years. As the Minister will know, it took almost three years to get the Commission to sign off on the scheme. If there is to be an extension, it should be as simple as possible in a regulatory sense. That is why I suggest extending it to the counties of Waterford and Limerick, even for a certain period of time. My understanding is that to do this, it may not be necessary to have new legislation underpinning variants of the scheme and it might be possible with a commencement order identifying the area in question and by utilisation of the Taxes Consolidation Acts.

My concern is that if we go down the road of identifying architectural conservation areas in various towns around the country, as proposed by the Heritage Council, we will probably have to deal with the European Commission again, and it could take another three years or longer. I believe the county version is simpler and more workable and it should be considered. When the Department of Finance thought up this proposal on the first day, a figure was assessed as to how much foregone revenue would be involved over a number of years. However, we will not come close to that in terms of take-up, based on the numbers I have seen so far. I believe we should vary the initiative but do so in a manner that capitalises on what is a very good scheme and, at the same time, waste as little time as possible. To focus on the two locations this initiative was constructed for at the outset would seem to make most sense.

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