Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

Government amendment No. 14 will address the matter. The plan as presented to the board was quite generous, but we did not determine that the board would establish the criteria. The criteria under discussion will be very tight. While the board can write the plan in whatever way it wants, I may be required to make new decisions. The CLÁR scheme is typical in the tightness of the criteria which apply. Whereas the Department makes decisions on, for example, class 3 roads which might have 65 year old persons living on them, the board has not wished to involve itself in detail of that sort in its operations. The importance we attach to establishing detailed criteria to ensure the focus is right to target funds where we mean them to apply is very much in keeping with the spirit of Senator Ryan's concerns. If the criteria were written in the plan, it would be voluminous and rewriting it in the event that the criteria had to be amended would be very tedious.

At times, things do not work out as simply as one originally expects. There was a year when I had a bit of money in the Department and we decided to fund the improvement of small country roads. It was a very simple operation. Funding was allocated to county councils on the basis of the population of each county and we indicated that no more than €20,000 should be spent per boreen. The scheme was aimed at those dead-end roads on which older people live and which are never the subject of improvement works. Any rural person could empathise with that objective. When the scheme was operating, Leitrim County Council contacted me to tell me it had a problem. While we had provided the council with overall funding of approximately €200,000, it had encountered a small bridge into a village which it would take €80,000 to improve. It was made of timber and was liable to be washed away in a flood. The county council wanted to know if it could spend four allocations of €20,000 on the bridge as it was not possible to improve one quarter of the bridge or to improve the entire structure over a four year period. The Department rewrote the criteria to maintain the existing funding provisions except in the case of a small bridge on a class 3 road. A county council can now improve a bridge in substitution for other works, even if it is required to spend more than €20,000.

We made an adult, rational decision in that instance. While local authorities were not being provided with a greater overall funding allocation, they were empowered to decide how to spend money. The reason I provided for allocations of €20,000 per road in the first place is that I have a suspicion about county engineers. They would rather build a motorway than a boreen or a large boreen than a small one. My intention was to focus on small, dead-end roads on which older people tend to live and which are never improved. While I was caught out by the criteria I had originally established, I could amend them openly and transparently.

While we are in broad agreement with Senator Ryan, it would not be useful to provide for circumstances in which an entire plan would have to be rewritten. I assure the Senator that the criteria will be published to allow everyone to know what they are. However, as it is very difficult to foresee every eventuality, I must have a mechanism to address a scenario in which matters do not work out the way we think they will. We must be able to change the criteria openly, transparently and fairly without having to rewrite the whole plan. That is the reason for the approach we are taking.