Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will share time, five minutes and five minutes. I thank the Minister for his initiative and pay tribute to the work done by his Department. More particularly, I want to pay tribute to community and voluntary groups. As my time is limited, I will limit my gratitude to those few words. I fully appreciate the work being done.

Today I want to zone in on one particular scheme. I ask for an update on the town and village pilot residential occupancy scheme, which I have followed up assiduously for the past two years. I took the trouble of reading the debates of the Joint Committee on Rural and Community Development. Some fabulous words were used, just like in the Minister's speech. I could not argue with him about the words used. We can move towards a more inclusive, resilient and sustainable future for everyone. That is what we want. The committee published an extremely interesting report. Mr. Hynes, who recently retired as the chief executive of Mayo County Council, used fantastic words such as "sustainable", "inclusive", "prosperous" and "proud" in respect of rural communities. He talked about community engagement and empowerment.

Unfortunately, that is not what we have in rural Ireland. As the Minister knows, I come from Galway West. My constituency stretches from the Aran Islands to Inishbofin, all of Connemara, both Irish and English speaking regions, and right up to the Minister's county of Mayo including Kilmaine and Shrule. I am fully aware of the variation. One thing which struck me about the former chief executive of Mayo County Council was that he asked us to change the narrative around towns and villages and the decline. He was absolutely right. There is no getting away from the fact that they are in decline, but we need to change the narrative behind these lovely sweet words to actually mean what we say.

The Minister started that, and I pay tribute to him for that. One of his particularly good initiatives was to increase occupancy. He picked six towns for that, one of which, it turned out, was in his constituency. If we learn from that I do not mind. I and other Deputies have followed up on this because it is the bridge to the future. The data from six towns, how the scheme worked and what we learned from it can be used as the bridge to rolling out the scheme to every county, in particular counties with Gaeltacht regions which we should not forget.

In my remaining two and a half minutes, maybe we could have a little interchange. Where are we at? Replies to parliamentary questions tabled by me and other Deputies indicated the report was to be published at the end of last year or certainly by the beginning of this year. Have all the reports come in from the six local authorities? Is the report available? Has it been published and, if so, have I missed it? I want the Minister to reply either "Yes" or "No". We have done all our praising and I have heard the whole debate. I just want the replies to the specific questions.

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