Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputies for the issues they raised. Under the second measure in the town centre first suite of supports, Newtownmountkennedy is the designated town in County Wicklow and Kanturk is the town in County Cork. It is very much about supporting these towns. The town centre first officer who will be appointed for each county can work with towns that need that support.

Youghal is a town I hear plenty about, especially from Deputy Stanton and some of his colleagues. In 2021, it was allocated €4.048 million under the RRDF for the delivery of a modern and fully resourced library for the town. It is a wonderful and important project. Mitchelstown was given €270,000 under category 2 of the RRDF to develop plans to repurpose a vacant landmark building to facilitate the overall branding and place making of a Georgian heritage cultural quarter. I visited the town with the Deputy the year before last.

There is a lot of investment being made under a number of different streams, all of which are tailored to meet specific needs. The purpose of the town centre first officers will be to co-ordinate and liaise with the local town team or the local community and come forward with applications. All the applications that come to my Department must go through the local authority. People need to engage with the local authority to make sure what they see as the right approach for their town comes through to my Department to be funded. There is €30,000 for Kanturk and Newtownmountkennedy to develop plans. It is important that towns have a plan. If everybody signs up to the plan, we know where we are going. If there is no plan, the process is all over the place, as we know. There are a lot of these plans in existence. Towns can look at what similar towns have done to see how they can develop a plan and build capacity within a town team.

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