Michael Ring (Mayo, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am surprised to hear that because I was told by colleagues yesterday that some of the local authorities have started spending some of the money that was reallocated to them last week. My understanding is that the local authorities have been notified, but I will correspond to the Deputy on that. The local authorities have been notified of the amount of money they are getting for the year.

Let us call a spade a spade. I allocated money in early February of this year to some of the local authorities and some of them have still not spent some of it. As a former councillor, the Deputy knows the LIS money, in particular, is always spent at the end of the year. I have been told by colleagues that many LIS roads are being done. Looking at the newspaper cuttings from around the country, I am being accused of giving money for roads because the local elections are coming up. I am pleased to have put €37 million into LIS roads to date.

Deputy Ó Cuív, to be fair to him, has been pushing me to reallocate money and the LIS is one of the better schemes. We wrote to the local authorities last year and gave them an indication of when we would allocate money. As I said, by October there had been a drawdown of €24.6 million from the capital budget. As Deputy Ó Cuív knows, the local authorities are always complaining that they have no money, yet when they are given money to spend and asked to draw it down, they leave it to the last minute to do so.

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