Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for the response. He has touched on the fact that there are two issues at play. First, it is a matter of filling in the gaps where there may be no community centres. Tramore is peculiar in this regard. It has a community of some 12,000 people, yet it does not have a community centre to serve it. It does not really have a village hall or shared community space to facilitate a large-scale sharing of views, small theatre groups and so on.

The second issue is that running a community centre results in substantial running costs. There is a genuine opportunity in this regard. With retrofitting, particularly the installation of renewables, for example, it will be possible to switch from incurring a cost to having a revenue source as we get feed-in tariffs. Having a dedicated source of funding is good and well worth pursuing within the Department.

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