Maureen O'Sullivan (Dublin Central, Independent) | Oireachtas source

We heard a presentation on community development in the AV room recently by Dr. Patricia Kelleher. She went back over the history of community development, looking at the early stages of the Land League, the Gaelic League and the co-operative movement and the forms of rural and urban community development in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. What we saw then was real community development. Projects were innovative, enterprising and effective because they were from the bottom up. Between 2008 and 2011, we saw funding cuts of between 35% and 40%. By 2009, over 180 community development projects had been dissolved, prompting the title of Dr. Kelleher's report, The Systematic Destruction of the Community Development, Anti-Poverty and Equality Movement (2002-2015). It appears that the new strategy for community development is top-down, consisting of development initiatives taken by statutory agencies and local authorities, sometimes in partnership with local people, but that is not real community development, as the Minister and I know it from the past. My question, therefore, is whether the Minister is confident that his report will bring back the kind of community development that led to real changes in the past.

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