Trevor Ó Clochartaigh (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate the clarification. I appreciate also that negotiations are ongoing. It is a misnomer to call these companies private companies; they are companies limited by guarantee. That is not the same as a private limited company but people might take that as being the case from what the Minister said. Prescriptive memorandums and articles of association were given by the then Minister's Department at the time, Deputy Ó Cuív, to all those companies to the effect that they had to be set up with 23 members in rural areas and, if I remember correctly, 21 members in urban areas. It was prescriptive that the number of members had to come from local authority representation, etc. To call the companies private limited companies is a misnomer. They are not private companies in any sense; they were set up to be responsible to all sectors in society.

Regarding the Schedule, the Minister said the companies I mentioned are not contracted with the Minister's Department as are the ones on the Schedule. Those on the Schedule are the Leader companies, the local development companies as such. Can the Minister clarify at this stage, in light of the negotiations taking place with ILDN, if it is his vision that those companies will remain in place and be the local deliverers because, if not, why are negotiations ongoing with them? It is like saying we are having negotiations with schools on an education issue but we might pull out of the negotiations and set up different schools afterwards. The Minister for Education and Skills would not say something like that. Does the Minister have a vision that the local delivery will happen through those companies because that needs to be put to bed here today?

I am very concerned about the Minister's comments on the audits. These programmes have not just appeared overnight. They have been in place for many years. Pobal has been responsible for quite a number of programmes, including the local community development programme and its successors. It has been involved in the child care programmes. The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine has been overseeing the Leader programmes. They have been auditing these programmes for many years. We have had European Union scrutiny of the Leader companies also. If the Minister is telling me there are serious overruns in companies where 20% was supposed to be allocated to overheads and 30% or 40% has been spent, that tells me there has been a serious lack of oversight on the part of the Department, Pobal and the EU on these issues.

On the question of who is to blame, I have seen previous Administrations put the blame on the local communities and let companies like Meitheal Forbartha na Gaeltachta, MFG, go to the wall-----