Phil Hogan (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I agree with the Senator's sentiments. What we are trying to do is rebalance the powers in favour of the elected members who were frustrated in recent times when the finances of local authorities were in difficulty and they saw an enormous amount of activity in their communities in the form of EU programmes into which they had little or no input. What we are doing is aligning the community with local government. We are not excluding anybody but including everybody and getting people to work more closely together at a time of finite resources to ensure we get the best possible results for the community without the enormous administrative costs that were a feature of various programmes in the past. I am showing some flexibility in terms of the numbers in bands and guidelines that I will lay down. In many of the Border counties, for example, peace programmes are operating in addition to the usual statutory programmes being implemented by the Government in the Republic. Therefore, there is a good reason for representation on local community development committees to take account of some of the existing programmes that will continue into the future, particularly in the context of the European Union's bottom-up approach to certain funds. My Department is consulting on a regular basis about the next round of EU funds and programmes to determine the most appropriate structure in order to get the best value for money and maximise the amount of money that goes to projects.

The elected members and the statutory bodies will not be allowed to dominate the local community development committees. If, for example, a committee has 15 members, eight must be non-statutory, non-elected and non-local authority representatives. The 15 members can decide who will chair the committee. In most cases, there will be three representatives of the local authority system, two of whom will be elected members, while the other will be an official. It will be up to the 15 members to decide who will chair the committee. As I said, in one of the pilot programmes we run in Cork a local community development committee has already been established and an elected member has become the chairperson. It depends on the relationship people have with their community. Elected members must foster that relationship and if they wish to become chairpersons of their local community development committees, there is nothing to stop them from doing so.

If all of the social partners want to be represented, as Senator David Cullinane has suggested, something will have to give. That something would probably be the local development companies, the partnership companies or the community sector. We should not have an unwieldy number of members of any group, but at the same time, we should have everybody, in so far as it is possible to do so, represented. It is very important that the representatives in the local community development structures - whoever they may be - are able to feed back the necessary information to their communities in a much more structured way than we have seen in the past. We do not want a repeat of the situation where people - often from the community sector - sat on committees but did not engage with those who had put them there. We need a more structured approach in that regard and that is what I am seeking to in the Bill. That is also why I asked Fr. Seán Healy and his committee to come up with proposals to improve matters further in order that everybody would know what was going on and everybody would have an input. The final decisions, however, will be made by the local community development committees. They will have the money and receive the applications for funding, while the funds will be dispersed through the existing financial structures of the local authorities. That will save money because we are using a structure that is already in place. It also bolsters the local government system, but it does not in any way denigrate the community projects that will come through the community sector and the elected members to the local community development committees.