Rose Conway Walsh (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State. This is a very important session. I commend and thank all of the volunteers connected with all of these schemes, which the Minister of State has outlined, and all the workers and participants on the schemes. They make a huge and valuable contribution to communities all over the country.

I want to make a few points on community development. I welcome every one of the schemes outlined and think there are many good schemes. However, my God, this Government and the Government that was in office in 2009 and 2010 cut the heart out of community development in this country. I know that because I witnessed it. It really was torn apart. I believe it was torn apart because it was a threat to the political establishment in that it was empowering people and building the capacity of people within communities. We could see it working. I worked for many years in the community development sector and I could really see the difference it was making. Instead of that, we now have a plethora of schemes but we have people tied up in form filling, counting numbers and recounting them. It is an issue of power and control and that worries me.

It was the wrong way to go. It was a very deliberate move. It was first mooted in the White Paper in 1999 where the Government started to look at how we could control community development organisations. These were people who were thinking for themselves and thinking outside the box but the Government set about trying to control and politicise them, which is an awful shame. We now have many of the programmes and schemes where the governance and bureaucracy ties up people's minds. It is a great loss to rural Ireland and other parts of Ireland that people are now caught up with form filling and making deadlines because they have to apply in the short gap between one date and another. The inflexibility around it all means there is little room for creative thinking.

We have had projects like the digital hubs. I will give an example of one of the projects that ran for a number of years under the community development programme. It was a computer programming project for children between the ages of eight and 15. We recognised that if we could get those children excited and passionate about computer programming, we could then tie that up with things like the transatlantic cable. We envisaged that we would have whole communities where there was a cohort of young people who were into computer programming and who would advance their education in that direction. There would be this human capital within communities and people would be able to stay at home, have their families at home, live in their communities and bring the heart back into communities. Of course, what did the Government do? It introduced savage cuts. Community development projects had up to 60% of their funding cut and they were then closed down. The reason I believe they were shut down is that they could not be controlled by the Government. There were all of these community responses that could happen near to the ground with very little money. Now, however, I find it very hard to get excited about community development.

This threatens volunteerism. For St. Patrick's Day parades or similar events, we now see that due to the bureaucracy and the insurance schemes that are necessary, fewer and fewer volunteers are coming forward. Volunteers are tired and worn out with the bureaucracy and governance. They then look at something like the children's hospital and they see the governance is not there. Governance is for the little people on the ground. There are programmes that cannot buy a packet of biscuits without going through a whole procurement process of tenders to get the best price and everything else. I am not saying there should not be governance, of course there should, and there should be accountability for any public money. However, it is weighted against the smaller schemes in a way it should not be.

I want to touch on a few of the schemes, the first being the community employment, CE, schemes. One of the most pressing issues is the lack of referrals. There are 1,990 vacant CE places advertised online and that figure has remained high for some time. Obviously, these are community-based roles, such as for childcare assistants, caretakers and support workers, many of which would not exist in towns and villages were it not for CE schemes. The first thing supervisors will say when it comes to the lack of referrals is that it is the Department's preference to refer people to JobPath over CE schemes. Some €140 million has gone to JobPath. I ask the Minister of State to look at the contracts and the mistakes that were made in JobPath. I ask him to look at the deals that are being done there, where people are being double-referred or taken off schemes to be put on JobPath because we have guaranteed these private companies X number of participants to give them revenue. It is wrong. This is €140 million that could be put into local employment and real community development. This needs to be looked at. That is why my party colleague, Deputy John Brady, brought forward a motion this week to stop referrals being made to JobPath. It is wrong and it does not add up.

Community employment is dying on its feet. Participants must be paid a minimum of €50 extra per week because we have to give them an incentive. The other big issue in regard to the CE schemes is the occupational pensions for CE supervisors and assistant supervisors. This was recommended by the Labour Court. We are asking the nurses to go back to the Labour Court and use its mechanisms to make deals yet this was a ruling it made. Where are the occupational pensions for supervisors and assistant supervisors of CE schemes? Please right that wrong. There will be a strike. This has been pushed and pushed. These people have been waiting but they have not got a pay rise for ten years. We will have a strike, which will mean the most vulnerable people in communities will be left without the vital services these schemes are delivering.

Another issue that can be dealt with very simply is to extend the age limit on the CE schemes from 66 to 70 to give people the choice to go on until the age of 70. Many people at that age are healthy and vibrant and make a huge contribution. They have huge experience and knowledge within their communities.

More flexibility is also needed in the rural social scheme to enable preferred relations, such as nieces and nephews, to be attached to herd number. I ask the Minister of State to look at this issue. The rural social scheme is a great scheme but it is too restrictive in terms of who can take it up.

The Government has to bring back the training funds for all of these programmes, whereby people could go and get proper training. Again, this was about empowering people and providing them with small resources that would give them huge returns. The programmes need to have proper training funds.

The Tús programme is only a one-year programme so participants are just beginning to gain confidence and skills when they have to leave. It is not right to build up people's expectations and then knock them down again. I ask the Minister of State to look at this. It needs to be a multi-annual programme rather than a one-year programme, so we can make the most of it. In addition, disability allowance recipients should be allowed to avail of this scheme, given people get disability allowance for many reasons.

I am tired of talking about the layers of bureaucracy for LEADER programmes, although I know some work has been done on this. The LEADER scheme has been completely politicised and brought in under the local authorities. It was operating in Ireland as a model of best practice throughout Europe. What did we do? We went in and destroyed it. It comes back to the power and control issue again.In Mayo, for instance, funding for the LEADER programme has been cut by between €10 million and €12 million. The Minister thinks that because he advertises every LEADER programme, it somehow gives the illusion that more money is available. There is little room for community responses to key issues under SICAP.

My heart was broken by what this and the previous Government did to community development because we could have very different communities when it comes to building the capacity of people and generating human capital. The Minister of State needs to be careful because the volunteers in this country are worn out and worn down but perhaps that was the intention in the first place.