Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

Yes. There will always be a problem and I do not know how we will legislate because one cannot legislate for every eventuality. I believe the cause of worry is simple. Say, for instance, Senator Ó Murchú has submitted an application and has asked that we turf out Senator Ryan's application and substitute his one. In reality that is not the kind of decision I make as Minister. The kind of decisions I make are interesting ones such as the one I mentioned about the bridge.

Another interesting decision that comes to mind is the village enhancement scheme under CLÁR. The method is that the local community and Leader company provide one sixth of the funding while the county council and my Department provides one third. However, the Department cannot give its allocation unless all the others have recommended it and if they do so the Department gives it automatically.

A fair question was raised about church carparks in the middle of towns which are often used for public parking Monday to Saturday. Some communities want to use the scheme to deter this use. The question was whether this use was covered by the scheme. I decided that it was covered if the carparks were open to the public every day of the week for other than religious services. I will bow to the views of the local community but somebody had to make the overriding judgment as to the criteria to be used to give a fine call on whether something was private, public or communal. These are the tricky issues. If the criteria is applied to one scheme then they must apply to all. I can think of many situations where this kind of decision-making applies. The one thing we have tried to avoid is making an individual decision. In the case of most of the schemes the individual decision is made by somebody who is not in the Department.

An interesting issue arose this year in the case of the RAPID schemes. We allocated money to each RAPID area implementation team with a double lock on the money. The local authority would do the work as it was the property of the local authority but the RAPID committee also had to agree because of the area implementation teams. I intended that it would be used for landscaping or for closing off an alleyway. The AITs were not aware that I intended following up what I called a traffic management scheme for ramps and traffic lights, dishing of pavements for use by disabled people and so on. Some AITs decided to use the money for those kind of things this year and I was asked if I was in agreement. I said if that is what they want to do with the money that is fine, but next year we will have other parallel schemes so they will have the money for the other things next year. When I made that rule for one, I made it for all and I can give the House endless examples. Somebody has to make the final call. I will reconsider this but if there was any way of assuaging fears that the Government might make capricious decisions such as changing orders, rather than make what I would call the rational decision, I would do so.

There is a funny irony to this issue. On the weekend of my recent accident I collected all the papers pertaining to this Bill and went through every amendment tabled by the Opposition to see if I could agree to any of them. Those papers, like everything else, went up in flames but I have a good memory and I could remember quite well——