On Item No. 3, I call Senator Bulbulia to move the motion. The Senator has 30 minutes. Speakers after Senator Bulbulia have 15 minutes each, with a Senator from Senator Bulbulia's side to second the motion.
EC Regional Fund Plans: Motion.
I move:
That Seanad Éireann deplores the Government's handling of the preparation of plans for submission to the enlarged EC Regional Fund and in particular the secrecy surrounding these preparations, the absence of effective local participation and the virtual exclusion of elected representatives from this process.
I rise to propose this motion in the name of Fine Gael in Private Members' time. The agreement reached at the Brussels Summit in February 1988 to double the Structural Funds by 1993 and to concentrate the spending of these funds in the poorer peripheral regions, for example, Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Spain, has considerable implications for this country. At the Summit it was also agreed that the funds would in future be allocated for programmes on a multi-annual basis rather than on projects based on annual allocations as in the past and, in addition, the Commission decided that there should be local input into the drawing up of such programmes.
This is perhaps one of the most significant developments in the lifetime of this State in financial and planning matters. Because of the significance of these decisions on every aspect of Irish life into the next century and probably beyond, Fine Gael are extremely concerned at the Government's extraordinarily inept and secretive handling of this £4 billion fund plan. The ham fisted approach on the part of Government was evident from the outset. While we were aware that Ireland had been designated as a single region, there was an inexcusable and inordinate delay in deciding upon and announcing the sub-regions. I remember on many occasions approaching the then Minister for Finance, whom I wish well in his new appointment, and asking him when a decision would be made about the sub-regions because, obviously, people in various parts of the country were concerned, anxious and rearing to go. The delay in finally determining the sub-regions was, as I have said, inexcusable.
When this long-awaited information on the sub-regions was finally forthcoming from the then Minister for Finance, Deputy Ray MacSharry, the designation of the regions was clearly shown to be arbitrary and bore no relation to existing structures in many instances. That is not just my criticism because one of the foremost critics in this area is a man with impeccable credentials to be critical — I refer to Mr. Tom Barrington, the former Director of the Institute of Public Administration, who has always been outspoken. He said that if you want to have regional bodies you must have a regional consciousness, like Bavaria, Tuscany or Catalonia. With the exception of the mid-west region, Limerick, Clare and North Tipperary where Shannon Development has made its mark, we just do not have that here and we are not going to cultivate it by chopping and changing all the time, taking a bit from Kerry and another bit from Offaly and tacking that on to the mid-west.
The Government could not, of course, devolve the task of drawing up regional plans upon the regional development organisations established in the sixties because they, in a most premature fashion as it now turns out, were abolished last year, supposedly to save money on travelling expenses. It is obvious that many of these regions are artificial entities and as such there is an absence of a regional consciousness, of cohesion and of the kind of coherent structures that are necessary in the preparation of these plans.
In the past criticisms were made of the old RDOs. I was never a member of one. I do know that people felt that they were, largely speaking, political talking shops but I contend that in fact they did a lot of useful and valuable work. I am going to speak about the one that was in my region, the South-Eastern Regional Development Organisation or SERDO as it was popularly known. It was headed by a most able person, Liam Murphy, and a lot of farseeing, imaginative and good substantial work was done by this body. It commissioned many valuable reports at great expenditure of public money. I would instance as an example the Bannon report in 1976 which dealt with Waterford as a service centre. This was revised in 1985. It got the IIRS to bring out a report on oil development. It asked An Foras Talúntais in 1977 to do a study on land potential and uses in the region and it also issued its own regional report in 1980.
There was hidden potential in the RDOs and they of course have been swept aside in, as I already stated, a most premature fashion as it now turns out. The Department of Finance had to invent new regions. They must have had a field day looking at the map, drawing lines. As an instance of how arbitrary and odd and strange they are, I refer to an article written by Frank McDonald, The Irish Times environment correspondent which appeared in The Irish Times of Monday, 5 December 1988. He talked about the fact that the greater Dublin region does not even cover the 01 telephone district excluding those parts of Meath, Kildare and Wicklow which are clearly connected to the city. Instead it consists of County Dublin alone, although this anachronistic enclave would not have qualified even as a sub-region, let alone a region, under the old arrangements.
Let us look at what the seven regions are. The south-east, I am relieved to say, remains intact as it was. It comprises counties Carlow, Kilkenny, Tipperary South Riding, Wexford and Waterford. The south-west encompasses County Cork and the electoral constituency of South Kerry. The mid-west consists of counties Clare, Limerick and Tipperary North Riding plus South-West Offaly and the constituency of North Kerry. The west contains counties Galway, Mayo and Roscommon, a border region embracing counties Donegal, Sligo, Leitrim, Cavan and Monaghan and the midlands east region containing counties Louth, Meath, Kildare, Wicklow, Laois, Longford and Westmeath and the remainder of Offaly.
When he made these announcements the Minister went on to state that he had arranged to have copies of a map showing the regions distributed with background information. So well he might produce a map illustrating this extraordinary, strange and anomalous carving up of the country. In fact, this information announcing the sub-regions appeared some six months after the Brussels summit. The announcement was made not in the Dáil where one might have expected it to be made but by the Minister, Deputy MacSharry, in a speech at the General Humbert Summer School in August of 1988. Summer schools are fine, good and wholesome and useful in their own way, but I contend that they are not quite the proper venue for important and signficant political announcements of such import. I certainly found that strange, as did many other people.
I want to comment again on the painstaking and expensively acquired information which the RDOs throughout the country had compiled. This has all now been carelessly swept aside. Another body of information which has been relegated and rendered useless in many instances by this new division of the country into sub-regions has been statistics dealing with the regions as they were. Of course statistics had been compiled and has been dealt with by the Central Statistics Office. All of these had been based on the old regions and they are now in many of the instances of the new regions utterly irrelevant. That is yet another cavalier brushing aside of valuable but now sadly anachronistic data. Thankfully the regional data bank in the south-east remains intact and unaffected by this crude surgery, or rather a form of butchery.
Nothing then happened for quite some time. On 8 September, eight months after the Brussels summit, a circular letter PD/188 issued from the Department of the Environment, planning and administration section, to county and city managers. I have a copy of it here in front of me. It announces framework regulations and the general position about the structural funds. It goes on to state: "It will also be noted that arrangements are to be announced regarding consultation at local level". It then invites queries about this. That letter came from the principal officer in the planning administration section of the Department of the Environment. Previous announcements had been made by the Minister for Finance. All of this is quite puzzling and it begs certain questions.
I hope this debate will be constructive and useful and that it will elicit important information. I want answers to questions such as: Who is handling or co-ordinating this plan? Who has the responsibility of overseeing this EC funding? What are the respective roles of the Minister for Finance and the Minister for the Environment? Where does the Minister of State, Deputy Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, fit into all of this? We are given to understand that she has special responsibility for European affairs. What are the limits of this responsibility as they pertain to the Structural Funds? Have we three Ministers all with the power in this area? Is this power equal? Are we talking of some sort of new trinity or triad? For my money it is a pretty unholy alliance and is a gross disservice to the Irish people these Ministers are elected to serve. Concerned citizens are right to ask what is going on and to express their doubts and concerns.
The plot thickens and the situation becomes even more puzzling because when he announced his Cabinet reshuffle the Taoiseach revealed that the Minister for the Environment, Deputy Flynn, was to be given extra responsibilities for co-ordinating plans for 1992. Subsequently Dáil questions tabled concerning regional plans for answer by the Minister for the Environment were transferred to the Minister for Finance. If, Deputy Flynn has, as was stated by the Taoiseach in the Dáil, a co-ordinating role or extra resonsibility in the area of EC funding, the questions would have been answered by him and would not have been transferred to the Minister for Finance. I am pleased that yet another Minister is here this evening to listen to this debate and to respond to it in due course because it makes the situation even a little more complicated. I hope that in his reply to this debate the Minister can shed a little light on this rather murky area.
The consultation process particularly with local elected representatives is — and it gives me no pleasure to say it — a sham and a charade. It makes a nonsense of the notion of participation and indicates a contemptuous attitude on the part of the Government towards the bedrock of democracy, the local elected public representative who, out of a sense of public duty, seeks to serve his community or her community in an unpaid and voluntary capacity and has the courage to go before the people and ask for a mandate to make decisions on behalf of the people. This local representative, towards whom lipservice is paid endlessly, now finds himself or herself sidelined and relegated in a crucial area of decision-making involving his or her very own region, and all of this comes from a Government who promise local government reform and treat us to threadbare cliches and worn platitudes about the meaning and value of local democratic structures.
In a Department of Finance document issued in October 1988 there was a ten point description of how the process of planning would proceed and the tenth and final point refers to the advisory group. It says: "An advisory group will assist the Working Group. The recommendations of the Advisory Group will be taken into account by the Working Group in drawing up the programme." That was the final point in a document entitled "Preparation of Programmes at Sub-national Level for EC Structural Funds" and it emanated from the Department of Finance. In other words, the local authority member, the salt of the earth, is furthest away from the decision maker or makers in all of this in something called an advisory group.
In the south-east this body held its inaugural meeting on 2 December, nine months after the Brussels decision, a sort of gestation period during which very little happened. Certainly as far as the local representative was concerned virtually nothing that concerend him or her was happening. The invitation to councillors to attend this inaugural meeting of the advisory group makes no mention of terms of reference or of the objectives and the suggested agenda is so scanty as to be hilarious were the matter not so deadly serious.
I have a copy of that invitation to attend and it says: "The inaugural meeting of the advisory group will take place ..." and it gives the time and the date and the venue and says: "with the following suggested agenda." It did not even warrant a real agenda; it was a suggested agenda —"National plan, Sub-national programme, Overview, the election of a chairperson by the members of the Advisory Group; Other Business. Then it went on: "The following documents are attached for your information:— List of members of the Advisory Group; The address to the Working Groups by the Minister for European Affairs, Outline of National Development Plan, Preparation of Programmes at Sub-national level and Proposed structure for Sub-regional programmes."
The letter added: "I hope you will be able to attend and look forward to meeting you, yours sincerely ..." This was from the secretary of the advisory group. It gives no other information about the individual concerned and it might have been a courtesy to members who were asked to come to meet in this inaugural session to have given them an indication as to the background of the secretary of the advisory group who, I am sure, is a very worthy person. I am not quarrelling about that or arguing about that, I just instance the absence of information as yet another veil of secrecy which appears to have been thrown over this whole thing.
We then come on to take a look at the members of the advisory group and again it is important to remember that if you were to look at a Christmas cake — and it is a rather seasonal analogy — you would have what I might call the stodge at the bottom. Then you have the marzipan layer between the icing and the stodge and then you have the icing. I intend to use that analogy to prove my point. On the advisory group, which appears to be a blueprint which is placed on every region irrespective of the needs of the region or the general composition of the region be it urban or rural, are foisted to the following groupings, the ICTU, the IFA, the CII, the ICMSA, the CIF, Macra na Feirme, ICOS, Chamber of Commerce and then the local representatives and in the case of the south-east there were five Fianna Fáil, two Fine Gael and two Labour, a kind of grouping which I am sure did not cause any great political unhappiness. It is interesting to see how the farming interests predominate the IFA, the ICMSA, Macra na Feirme and ICOS, in other words four groupings of farmers, the trade unions and then the business interests together with the local representatives.
I am interested in knowing where are the women in all of this? Where are the community groups? Where are the voluntary bodies? Where are so many other facets of Irish society who have plenty to say about the Structural Funds, about regional development and about the way in which they wish to see their community and their region develop. I would like to know why the advisory group of 17 people is largely composed of what I might term heavyweight interests and so largely unrepresentative of other groupings within the community and within the society who have a right to have their voices heard on a body such as this.
Reference has also been made to the fact that public advertisements would be placed seeking submissions from all interested groupings in each region and I suppose that is a sop in the general area or towards the groupings which I have stated are absent from the advisory group. We are at a very late stage now and I am severely critical of the timescale for all of this. If it is decided to conduct this basic exercise in democracy and invite submissions to the advisory group, the third tier in the decision making process, when can it be done in sufficient time because I understand that, given the present timetable, the Government must submit their overall plan to the EC Commission by the end of next March and I understand that the working party and the advisory group must have their work completed pretty smartly. Unless we are to have another sham and another charade in inviting submissions from interested parties, I do not see how inviting submissions can be a meaningful part of this entire exericise.
It was intriguing to see in Frank McDonald's article in The Irish Times of 5 December 1988 that “a private invitation has been sent to a select number of bodies, asking for their views, but the consultants will not even say who these are.” It names an official, Mr. Michael Tutty, the Department of Finance official co-ordinating the programme and says he declined an interview because he was “too busy”. We are all busy but we all recognise that a certain public relations exercise needs to be carried out in particular in relation to the expenditure of what is presumed to be in the region of £4 billion.
I want to know — and I hope the Minister will provide these answers in his reply — which bodies have received private invitations to submit views. Who decided this? Why should it be shrouded in secrecy? Will the Department of Finance official co-ordinating the programme do us all a favour and come out and be given ministerial permission, if that is what is holding him back, or encouragement to engage in open dialogue? So great is the frustration being felt by some groups that one member of the living city group, a well known campaigner for and on behalf of Dublin, Deirdre Kelly, has actually written to Monsieur Jacques Delors, President of the EC Commission urging him to postpone consideration of Ireland's claim for regional development aid from Brussels on the ground that the Government here have made no real effort to involve people in deciding what the money should be spent on. Ms Kelly, in, I understand, a lengthy letter to M. Delors said that many voluntary organisations and community groups were not even aware that a major programme of EC aid was being prepared. She suggested a period of at least six months which should be set aside to give them an opportunity to contribute, with public funding provided to enable them to do so. Ms. Kelly is a doughty campaigner and full marks to her for spotting that the Government had been so lacking in their democratic and consultative approach in the implementation of this planning process.
I now want to take a look at the working groups membership and I have in front of me a list of those members who are on this 24 person grouping in the south-east region. Of the 24 people who are considering regional planning and priorities and the integrated programme in the south-east region, 12 are Dublin-based. One has a Kerry address and the rest come from the regions. It is surprising to see that in the regions we need this importation of undoubtedly worthy people but people who do not have an intimate knowledge going back over a long time of the demands, the needs and the requirements of a region and I find that very strange indeed. I am happy to see that the City Manager from Waterford and the five county managers from the region are on the working group and I know that they will provide much-needed background information for these other worthy people who will be studying our region and helping to decide on what are the priorities and how the programme should be presented to Government.
It is also interesting to note in passing that of the 24 members of the south-east working group one is a woman and she is there in her capacity as the regional director of FÁS. I think it is a comment on the fact that women in this country have not risen to directorship or management levels to any significant degree and it is extremely disappointing because I firmly believe and I am of the deeply-held view that they have something to contribute to the decision-making process in Irish life. In this major decision-making area they are virtually totally absent. That is a grave, grave disappointment.
The Minister of State for European Affairs who is part of the trinity or triad I referred to, made an interesting speech at the establishment of the meetings for the working groups. I have in front of me a script delivered by the Minister in Sligo on 10 October and I understand it is a standard script and one which was used around the country by the Minister and reference is made in that script to local interests. She says: "This is the first time that local interests will be directly involved in preparing programmes". I am not too happy about that. She says: "The Taoiseach has asked me to address personally the local representatives on each of the new working groups". Presumably what is meant by that is not the local public representatives but the local representatives themselves.
The Minister also talks about an invigorated regional policy but in view of the fact that time is running out I will be brief, she goes on to say that the Government consider these developments in relation to the Structural Funds as being of crucial importance for Ireland. Of course they are crucial importance for Ireland. We accept that and that is why we are so deeply concerned at the extraordinary way in which this matter is proceeding.
For example, in a paper connected with our council the city manager, it is minuted, in Waterford city stated that any EC Structural Funds allocated to the corporation will require a local contribution and he pointed out that no provision for such a contribution was included in the draft estimates. He said it would be a cause of embarrassment in 1989 if grants allocated could not be taken up because of lack of local contribution. How could local authorities have the matching funds when they are so severely strapped for cash and are operating at a minimum level of achievement?
Also, I understand that an announcement has been made that private funding will be very important in this whole area and the co-ordinator of this programme for Europe has gone on record at a public meeting in Cork as saying that he hoped that private enterprise would be made very clearly aware of their role in all of this. He even said it does not matter where the money comes from: if it comes from Church gate collections it is money that Brussels will be happy to recognise as being a contribution towards funding of these regional programmes. To date I do not believe that the private interests in this country are really aware that there is a possibility for them to involve themselves in major economic programmes in the regions. I think it is incumbent on whomever is managing or co-ordinating this matter to let that be known loudly and clearly so that people will be enthused about it and will wish to contribute to it.
There was much more I wanted to say about the absence of local towns from the decision-making of the advisory bodies; for instance, the nine urban councils in Cork are absent from the advisory group although the county councils and the major authorities are there. I have never been an admirer of advisory groups as such. They are there in this instance to put a veneer of respectability on the working party and the working party will report to the Department of Finance and the end decision will be a political decision. If that decision is anything like the decisions that are being made about lottery funding, we will see decisions of disgraceful political expediency made on this. There will be situations in regions where priorities are clashing and where the situations at the end of the day will be politically very, very awkward and I think that some of the members of the working party have been put in an extremely embarrassing position. With that I will conclude. Once more I state my support for the motion.
I wish to second the motion proposed by Senator Bulbulia. The reason this motion comes before the House derives initially from the decision of the heads of the various European countries last February to double the Structural Funds that are available in the Community from 1992. During the intergovernmental conference on the Single European Act the major trade-off between the peripheral areas and the centre concerning the internal market was the inclusion in the treaty of a section on economic and social cohesion.
There is a general misunderstanding in the community that Structural Funds just deal with road funds and European Regional Development Funds that we have seen being expended over a number of years in carrying out major infrastructural development in this country. Structural Funds also include the Social Fund, the Common Agricultural Policy and the Structural Guarantee Fund.
Ireland has been a tremendous beneficiary of those funds over the years and with the doubling of those funds from 1992 it will offer yet another opportunity for Ireland if we have sufficient planning done in order to exploit a financial reserve and a financial resource from that area that we have not had the advantage of up to now. In view of the level of unemployment and the massive emigration because of lack of work, the Social Fund makes a significant contribution to resolve this great haemorrhage in Irish society today. Also people could get an opportunity in the European Community through the Social Fund to get some experience, certainly in the area of migration and of the various funds that would be available for exchange. This could be assisted under this particular doubling of the fund.
In agriculture the disadvantaged areas have featured in the regional development of many parts of the country over the last number of years. I would hope that with the doubling of this particular fund we will see a more aggressive approach than we have had up to now from this Government in relation to the reclassfication and extension of many of the areas that come under the particular heading at the moment. I know, the Minister is only too well aware of deputations to Ministers for Agriculture or Finance in relation to this vexed question of boundaries, disadvantaged areas and the reclassification of same. It is a thorny one that goes on, and seems never ending. I am disappointed that the Minister for Agriculture and Food in this Government does not seem to have any interest whatsoever in formulating a survey and presenting a submission to Brussels in order to extend the boundaries of the disadvantaged areas.
The Minister is well aware that nothing has been done in relation to putting in a submission in order to extend those boundaries and to make the best possible use of the financial resources we have under the structural guarantee section in the Department of Agriculture and Food. We have Jacques Delors, President of the Commission, coming to Ireland and saying that it is important to keep people on the land and to keep people on the peripheral regions of Europe actively involved in agriculture in order to prevent them from going into the more industrial locations where there is high unemployment. I would hope that this Government would take the advice of the President of the Commission who was giving an open invitation to them to make the necessary submissions as soon as possible in order to exploit that open door that is available to the Government. They failed miserably to take on this work up to now.
The achievement of the Brussels Summit in February in doubling the funds from 1992 will also double the funds for priority regions. Ireland has been classified, with a number of other countries, as a class number one country in order to achieve an objective which has been laid down for the less developed regions. It is important that we were classified under the particular objective. It will give us greater access to more funds under the Structural Funds than other coountries at the centre of the European Community might expect. It is estimated that the funds will reach £10.14 billion by 1992 in comparison with £5.46 billion in 1987. Ireland, in 1987, received approximately £348 million from the three funds I have mentioned — the European Regional Development Fund, the Social Fund and the agricultural fund. This would suggest that at most we can expect to get in 1992 about £700 million, which would amount to about 4 per cent of gross national product at current prices. That is a significant increase in the funds. If we have not got the matching funds, the necessary funds made available under our public capital programme, we will certainly fail to exploit that huge financial resource which we can use to the benefit of the people in this country.
There are questions on the distribution of the increase in the funds that must be answered as well. There is rising expectations of what these funds can achieve for this country and well. We have to bear that in mind. We must not encourage a euphoria of expectation that will not be met by this country, or cannot possibly be met in one tight financial situation.
The Commission has attempted to develop and improve the operation of the funds during their periodic reviews every five years. It has used every opportunity to carry out reform in this area. This is by far the most fundamental and far-reaching reform we have ever had since we became a member of the European Community. As I have said, we have come under objective number one, which caters for the less developed regions, as does Northern Ireland. This is because of the fact that we have come under the 74 per cent of per capita income, that is, under the 74 per cent of the EC average.
Perhaps the fact that Ireland is treated as one region will bring about tensions in the various regions in this country when it comes to the final plan that will be submitted to the Commission for financial aid at the end of March. I hope that the various plans that will come forward from the sub-regions will represent a broad spread of funds right across the country, rather than a concentration of so many funds in one region over another. Over the years this has worked to the detriment of some regions and to the advantage of others.
Any fair-minded person will say that the huge amount of resources being spent in Dublin in comparison with the rest of the country leaves much to be desired in terms of the public capital programme to local authorities. I know, a Leas-Chathaoirligh, you will not agree with me, but if you saw the condition of country roads in Kilkenny, and in most of the other constituencies around the country, you would see how well Dublin is doing in comparison with the lack of resources we have. People have difficulty in getting their motor cars out of potholes these days in my part of the country. This certainly shows the lack of commitment this Government have given to local democracy since they came into power in 1987. The Minister of State at the Department of the Environment, Deputy Connolly, is certainly the Minister for urban renewal, but he will fast gain the reputation of being the Minister for rural decay unless he comes up with a package very shortly to improve the lot of the people in rural Ireland. The Minister is from a rural area and I know he will add his voice to the representations that have been made by all local authorities outside Dublin in order to improve the condition of rural people, who seem to have been forgotten in the past couple of years in terms of local authority investment.
Each region will have to prepare a multi-annual plan and submit it to the Commission setting out the priorities and measures that are needed and are proposed in that region. Certainly it implies that the Department of Finance, who have been concentrating on the budget under the European Regional Development Fund over the years, will now have to pay more attention to their developmental role rather than just milk the system for what they could get through the European Community over the years. We will need to decide what our investment priorities are in order to ensure that we have the necessary planning done so that the Government will have the necessary matching funds, under the public capital programmes, in order to get all the various projects that are essential.
We must improve the infrastructural development and become more competitive as a European nation in the context of 1992. The Commission itself envisages making suggestions. Grants and loans, and the involvement of the private sector, will be important. I certainly welcome the involvement of private investment and this should be made more attractive for people in order to get as much funds as we can under the Structural Funds. The unfortunate thing is that we have a difficulty at the moment in co-ordination of the structures that have been put in place in order to plan for this advantage.
The national and regional plans will be drawn up by the Department of Finance and the European Commission. Local authority managers, who are nominally involved in the process, will have very little say. People who are living links and who turn the national economy into a living entity will have no involvement at all in planning. I am speaking of the workers, managers, managing directors, self-employed persons, farmers, educators and all the other people whose activity when added together constitutes the national economy. None of the people who are charged with the task — however perfectly or imperfectly they discharge it — of turning popular desire into political action and of tailoring political action in the public interest will have any influence in these plans. I am speaking, of course, of local authorities and Members of the Oireachtas. The whole planning machine will motor on without any input at all from those people.
The consultative structures that have been set in place are only a sham. Day after day even the very people who have been asked and who have been invited to consult are expressing the opinion that they are only a sham and a cosmetic exercise in order to give the impression that consultation is taking place. It is a public relations exercise. The issue is very important. It is far too important for the regions of this country to have it treated in such a cynical way. I regret to say, Minister, because I have a great relationship with yourself personally, that the experience of Fianna Fáil in Government has been to adopt a very centralist and Kremlim-type approach, without glasnost or perestroika, but with a knife edge that has been savage in the extreme. With the plans, the planning at regional level and the planning that could largely be done by local authorities and local representatives, we have missed the opportunity to reform the system of local government on this occasion.
The Minister for the Environment, Deputy Flynn, participated in the debate on a motion in this House in October 1987 about the reform and the funding of local government. He was buoyant about the fact that he would have radical reforms for local government by Christmas, 1987. He said loud cheers would go out from each of the Senators in this House when they heard what plans he had in mind to ensure that local representation would be alive and well under Fianna Fáil. The unfortunate experience has been that he has certainly brought about a stillborn birth in relation to the plans that he had in mind. Perhaps he has got involved in other debates. Obviously the smog has intervened. Maybe it has taken hold in this instance to the detriment of local government reform.
The outcome of the present situation and the present planning will be a mishmash of old county development plans that will be drawn out of the cupboards of each local authority because of lack of finance for the past few years. They will be bound again between new covers and re-presented to the Government and the Department of Finance. The mandarins in the Department of Finance must do something or we will be back to the same old story of putting a label on these plans and sending them back to the local authorities telling us how particular funds should be spent, telling us how particular projects should be operated — whether by public contract or private contract — and the local elected representatives, who are the people who have to go before the electorate and be answerable to them at the end of the day will have no say whatsoever in the actual formation of these plans or the spending of the money.
In my opinion that is utter contempt for local democracy. I am not surprised. We are not sure whether the present Minister for the Environment has responsibility for the Structural Funds or not. Perhaps the cloud and the smog will clear shortly and then we will know. He has abolished the power of many of the local representatives.
The county committees of agriculture have been abolished under this Government. The National Social Service Board, the health committees and the regional development organisations have been abolished. These were the vehicles they needed 12 months ago in order to plan for the future of our regions and to plan for investment. They were needed to make the necessary submissions. The Minister actually abolished them. That shows a lack of vision. We are asked to make submissions on behalf of this country to Europe in order to gain the necessary advantages from the doubling of the Structural Funds from 1992.
I hope the matters I have raised will bring to the attention of the Government the fact that local representatives are ashamed that they have been given no input whatsoever. All Members of this House in particular should support a motion which gives more power to local representation and more authority to them to make submissions.
I would like to commend the Government's handling of the preparation of plans for submission to what this motion describes as the enlarged EC regional fund. I want to refute, in the strongest possible manner, the three allegations which are made in this motion.
The allegations are first, that there is secrecy surrounding these preparations; secondly, that there is an absence of effective local representation; and thirdly, that elected representatives are virtually excluded from the process. Nothing could be further from the truth. These allegations are totally and completely at variance with the facts. This motion is nothing more than a blatant and cynical attempt to distort the true situation and to misrepresent what I believe is one of the most important exercises ever undertaken in this country.
In order to maximise our entitlement from the doubling of the size of the Structural Funds and in order to ensure that the best use will be made of the increased resources which will become available to Ireland from these funds a development plan is being prepared at national level, and operational programmes at sub-national level are being drawn up in the seven regions into which the country has been divided for this purpose. I see nothing wrong with this approach, and I welcome it. I look forward to the coming into effect of the new regime for European Community structural funding. I am satisfied, too, that the boundaries of the seven sub-national programme areas, as well as the composition and the role of the advisory and working groups in these regions, were decided on by the Government only after the fullest consideration of all the issues involved.
Furthermore, it is important to note that the Government secured the agreement of the social partners to these arrangements through the central review committee of the Programme for National Recovery. The development plan for Ireland has to be submitted to the European Community by 31 March. As I understand it, the Government have decided to submit the sub-national operational programme along with the plan which means that the deadline of 31 March obtains for both the plan and the programmes. I shall come back to this matter later and deal with the allegations which have been made that the timescale involved is too short.
However, I want to state that there is no secrecy, as is alleged in this motion, about the arrangements for the preparation of the sub-national programmes. The procedure has been spelled out very clearly by several Ministers in a variety of different fora at various times over the past number of months. I believe that there is a general welcome for the fact that, for the first time ever in this country, local interests are directly involved in preparing regional programmes to be assisted by European Community Structural Funds. This approach will enable us to maximise to the fullest our entitlements from the doubling in the size of these funds. It is of vital importance for us to do so if we are to gear ourselves adequately to compete successfully in the internal market and if we are to succeed in narrowing the gap between our living standards and those in the more prosperous regions of the Community and, indeed, if we are to reduce unemployment in this country.
The working groups and the advisory groups, which have been established in each of the seven regions, are now engaged in the task which they have been given of formulating the sub-national programmes. The composition of the working groups and the advisory groups ensures that local authorities and all the main representative bodies, together with all the relevant government Departments and State bodies, will be involved in the preparation of the sub-national operational programmes.
As Chairman of Roscommon County Council, I have the honour to be a member of the advisory group in region 5, which comprises the counties of Galway, Mayo and Roscommon. I can assure the House that that particular advisory group intend to play a major role in the formulation of the programme for their region. From the discussions which have taken place to date, I am confident that there will be the widest possible consultation with all relevant sources within the region. Submissions will be sought. Every consideration will be given to each proposal and idea which come forward from whatever source.
It is suggested in the motion that elected local representatives are virtually excluded from the planning process. I do not accept that this is or was the intention. This is very much a matter for the public representatives themselves. I can assure the House that I will ensure that it does not happen as far as the elected members of Roscommon County Council are concerned.
Already some weeks ago, our council had a special meeting at which the members were briefed on developments to date in relation to the preparation of the programme for the region. On Monday next we are having another special meeting at which members will have an opportunity to put forward their ideas and their proposals in relation to the matters which they consider worthy of priority. All such proposals will be brought forward by me, as chairman, to the advisory group and by the county manager to the working group for further consideration. It would be my intention to keep members fully briefed as the situation progresses and to ensure that such further meetings as become necessary are held.
I would be amazed if the same type of consultation is not taking place in most, if indeed not in all, the other counties. I am certainly aware of a number of counties where meetings along the lines I have mentioned involving the local representatives have already taken place or are planned. I believe that in this way public representatives can, if they wish, have a major input into the formulation of the programmes for their respective regions.
It is unrealistic to suggest that all elected representatives should be members of the groups preparing the programmes. There must be a limit to the size of these groups if they are to be effective and function properly. Besides, in view of the scope which is there for the type of consultative process I have outlined, there is no reason whatever why elected representatives cannot play a major role in determining the final shape of the programmes for their regions.
Why can they not be on a working party?
I did not interrupt Senator Bulbulia, although I was sorely tempted at many stages of her speech to do so.
You have great self-control.
I have some self-control. I am, I hope, an orderly Senator and having some experience as a chairman of a local authority of keeping disorderly members under control, I do not normally interrupt any speaker even though as I say, at times, I may be sorely tempted to do so. I see no reason at all why elected representatives cannot play a major role in determining the final shape of programmes for their regions.
The motion also refers to the absence of effective local participation. I would point out, as Senator Bulbulia has already done, that on the advisory group in each region the following bodies are represented: the CII, CIF, IFA, ICMSA, ICTU, FUE, ICOS, Macra na Feirme and chambers of commerce. Are the Senators who put down this motion suggesting that representative of these organisations at regional level are not capable of participating effectively in the formulation of regional programmes?
What have they got to say?
Are they suggesting the advisory groups do not constitute local participation? I certainly want to put on the record that I could not go along with that view. I believe that through the involvement of this wide range of sectoral interests the advisory groups will have the benefit of a huge fund of local knowledge and local experience which will have a most beneficial impact on what is contained in the final documents. In addition to the participation of all these representative bodies, any member of the general public or any organisation not represented on the advisory groups is totally free to make whatever submissions they wish. I understand it is the intention to invite such submissions through advertisements in the media.
When?
I would suggest there is still plenty of time to do that. I will come back now to the timescale for the preparation of the sub-national programmes. It has been suggested that it will not be possible to have them completed by 31 March next. I have also heard it suggested that the commission have up to six months after the national plan is submitted to complete the Community support framework, that the sub-national programmes will not be approved until after the framework has been agreed and that, therefore, there is no urgency about the finalisation of the sub-national programmes. This may or may not be the case. Apparently, our Government have their own reasons for the decision to submit these programmes at the same time as the national plan is being submitted. If the Government are satisfied that there are good reasons why this should be done, then I am prepared to accept the Government's judgment in this matter.
As regards the argument that the time is too short, I believe that sometimes it can be a disadvantage to have a lot of time available to complete a particular task. In such a situation things tend to be put on the long finger and the sense of urgency which should apply to the work in hand can disappear. It is better to have a deadline to meet. Of course, in this case it is very different to what the position would be if we were starting completely from scratch in every sense of the word. This is not so as far as the preparation of these programmes is concerned. There is already a huge body of material there in every region on many of the broad areas which will be covered in the programmes. For example, all local authorities have long since identified and prioritised the infrastructural needs of their respective areas. In the same way there are existing strategies for the development of tourism and agriculture and, indeed, for the development of manufacturing industry.
Every county development plan worthy of the name has identified the amenity areas and the natural resources within the area which it covers, and has outlined the development which is desirable in the case of these resources. In the same way I would expect that every county development plan has set down objectives in relation to environmental protection. A large part of the work that needs to be done in each region is to build on what is already there, to expand, revise and update that material and to bring all the developmental threads together within the region in an integrated way. I am satisfied that if this work is taken seriously — and I have every confidence that it will — then there will be no difficulty in meeting the deadline of 31 March.
There is a general welcome for the fact that for the first time Ireland is involved in the preparation of sub-national programmes and that the development plan which the Government will be submitting to the EC Commission under the reformed and expanded Structural Funds will be accompanied by a series of programmes which will set out in great detail how the general objectives of the plan will be implemented. These programmes will complement the development plan. Their preparation provides an opportunity to the people in each region to make a real developmental contribution in the context of the overall development plan for the country.
I accept, too, that it is entirely logical that the plan and the programmes must when completed be consistent with one another. Hence, some agency must have overall responsibility for the final package. However, I sincerely hope that this requirement will not be used as a justification for rewriting in any material or substantial way the programmes which emanate from the regions. I would welcome such an assurance from the Minister.
I also hope that it is the intention, when it comes to the implementation of the programmes that there will be groups established in the regions to monitor progress and to ensure that the priorities as identified in the regional programmes will be adhered to. As I said at the outset, I refute the thrust of this motion. I have every confidence that in the years ahead we will see real regional development taking place in this country.
I would like to agree with the motion that has been put down by my party that Seanad Éireann deplores the Government's handling of the preparation of plans for submission to the enlarged EC Regional Fund and in particular the secrecy surrounding these preparations, the absence of effective local participation and the virtual exclusion of elected representatives from this process.
There are three areas, basically, that come up. One is the make-up of the regions; second is local participation and the third point is secrecy. If you look at the map you get the impression that some person in Dublin sat down, took out a map of Ireland, drew lines around it and came up with seven regions. I am living in a county which is in the Border region. When I went to school I was taught geography but now I see that Sligo is in the Border region and Louth is outside of it. I cannot understand that omission. Perhaps the Minister might be able to shed some light on it but as for as I am concerned there is no logical explanation for it. Louth would have more in common with businesses located along the Border. On many occasions I have spoken in this House about such businesses finding it difficult to be competitive because of their proximity to Northern Ireland and also because of the rates of VAT. However that is another subject altogether and I do not want to get involved in it. All the counties along the Border have a lot in common and it is unfair to include a county which does not touch the Border.
Another reason I am against the way the regions have been made up is that counties are divided. For example parts of Offaly and Kerry are in region three and region four. I remember when Leitrim was divided into three different constituencies. It is detrimental to county to be divided and as a county we found it very difficult to recover from that. It is stupid to divide counties. It is a bureaucratic move. I cannot understand it and I fail to see the logic behind it. It will only cause problems rather than alleviate them. If work is being carried out and money is made available from the Regional Fund, who is going to explain why it is made available in one section of the county and not in another? I have no doubt who will get the flak in counties like Offaly and Kerry — it will be the poor local politician when some man or woman will come in and ask why work is not being done in their town and why is it being done in another one.
The Minister, who is a politician in a rural area, knows that it is local politicians who get all the flak. It is not the county manager, county secretary or administrators within the councils. It is the local politicians, to whom the people come.
Who send us in here.
I am only supporting the Chair and making life easier for the Chair. The fact that money from the Regional Development Fund is being made available to us is perceived as one of the great steps forward for Ireland. People are talking about local democracy being eroded. This is an excellent way to allow local representatives to participate in a very worthwhile and positive way in their community but we have been excluded from it, unfortunately. I cannot understand why these regions have been set up when we had regions under the old RDOs which had drawn up their own plans for the development of each area. The reason given for doing away with them was to save money on travelling expenses. I do not know if we will save any more money than had been envisaged would be saved with the doing away of the RDOs.
Senator Mullooly said that local councillors and local public representatives would be consulted on matters going before the working body in Dublin. We are not naive: we know that when a decision has been made, the consultation will be very quickly forgotten about and thrown at the back of a pile.
I also find disturbing that there are no statutory requirements to give information to members of local authorities or regions. I do not know why there should be such secrecy. It is up to the county manager or whoever is on the development authority to decide whether they should inform members of a local authority but there is no statutory obligation on them to do so. That should be looked at particularly if the Government decide to give local representatives a better chance to participate in these regions.
Most of us in this House have experienced of being on local authorities. County managers in general are representatives of the Department of the Environment. It comes back to the old issue that a county manager is a civil servant and the people who are elected — local authority members, urban councillors, town commissioners, whoever goes out and puts his neck on the line — have been given no say in this. To give a county manager the right not to have to come back and statutorily report to the council authority is a major flaw in the whole process.
I cannot understand why the Government have been so secretive about the regional development funding programme. In some regions, the secretaries are county development officers and I agree with that. However, there are other counties where Army commandants are secretaries to the region. Why should an Army commandant rather than a county development officer be given the position as secretary to these regions? It is very secretive. Nobody has ever addressed this. I hope the Minister will be able to tell us why. I am not casting any aspersions or doubts on Army personnel but it is a very strange sort of appointment to make. County development officers work every day towards developing a region or a county. I do not know what the work day of a commandant entails but I know in County Leitrim we do not have any commandants going around trying to develop the county. I would say the same applies in every other county. Perhaps it might have something to do with NATO. The Minister or the Government might be taking a line towards that. We would like to know.
They will have to wait until some of us are gone to do that.
Is that a political statement?
Perhaps the Minister will explain to us why Army commandants have taken up this very prestigious position. Leitrim made several submissions regarding regional development. They made submissions to different European Commissioners. They made submissions to the former Minister for Finance, Deputy MacSharry, who will be our next Commissioner. They also made submissions to other bodies who are involved in the development of the area. Our council were involved in a regional strategy plan, which was part funded by the EC, for Donegal, Sligo and Leitrim.
Members of my local authority, Leitrim County Council, were very anxious to co-operate with their counterparts in County Fermanagh. Since we are in the Border region that is the type of attitude we have to take: to cross boundaries, be they imaginary or not. We are very anxious that the committee in Dublin should take this on board and help us to make contact with our counterparts in Northern Ireland who have the same type of land and population. It would be a very worthwhile exercise in regional development.
There is one aspect that bothers me. Local politicians seemingly are not to be trusted to make decisions. That is a sad reflection on any Government. I suggest that the Minister should take on board the idea of a statutory role for local authorities and their members so that they can participate fully in regional development. We have a statutory role for members of elected bodies under the Emergency Fire Services Act, 1981, and the 1963 planning Act. I do not want to be unkind to civil servants but they seem to be faceless bureaucrats. Nobody knows them, nobody sees them and nobody knows where the money has come from or who made the submissions. It is very unfair and it is a retrograde step which has been taken by the Government.
I do not intend to dwell at great length on this subject. I agree with everything said by Senator Mullooly in his contribution. He brought a new dimension to the debate in that he is currently active representing Roscommon County Council on a sub-regional committee. At the beginning of this saga of the creation of the national and sub-national committees I felt disappointed that there was not a greater role for local authority members. On reflection, the Government's choice was simple; they either wanted to get the submissions in reasonably early in 1989 or to have a lengthy debate which would most definitely take at least a year if not two.
Senator Bulbulia touched briefly on the situation that would prevail in Cork if, for example, we were to seek representation for local authority membership in that one sub-region where you have 48 members of the council, seven or eight urban district councils and six town commissioners. These groups have already complained bitterly that they have not been represented. The difficulty is quite simply: where would one stop? Should it be all the councils, should it be part of the council, should it be just the chairman? In Cork, for example, we have three separate county councils within the confines of the one county. Should it be each of the three county council areas? Should it be the urban councils? Should there be some town commission representation? Where would it end? That is the difficulty that would confront anybody who tried to have some measure of local representation along the lines suggested here this evening.
The same applies to the division of the regions. Where does one stop and where does one begin? Solomon, who was supposed to be an extremely wise person, could not resolve the problem of dividing sub-regions to everybody's satisfaction. We saw the difficulty that confronted the commission sitting on the division of the boundaries for constituencies, for example. That most definitely did not satisfy everybody. It appeared to be a relatively simple exercise. Yet the public's response was one of total dismay at that operation. It is impossible to satisfy everybody when it comes to drawing boundary lines on any map. At the end of the day a reasonably good mixture was achieved. We are happy enough in our region that we only got half of Kerry. We could have got all of Kerry and then we would have had real problems. Without being facetious, we are very happy to have Kerry because they are great to have at our backs.
Ever the diplomat.
Except on the first Sunday in July.
It is a difficult task. We must deal with this as expeditiously as possible because since the day we joined the European Community we have had a problem in that we did not have a sufficient number of updated programmes submitted. We were not availing of all the funds in any of the categories. We were constantly being told that. Fine Gael, the Labour Party and every party were constantly berating the Minister for Finance of the day and seeing we did not have enough plans in, we are not availing of all the funds. Now when we are endeavouring to expedite this matter we are being told there is not enough consultation. Surely we could not get a group as broadly based as the present one? If I have a criticism to make it is that there are too many strata of Irish society represented on the committees at present. That would slow down the process but for the fact that we have a plethora of plans in every region at present. It is really only a matter of creating priority lists.
Virtually every region has a regional strategy study in place at present. Every county council and corporation has county development plans and then, of course, there are tourism plans, chamber of commerce plans and various other plans. In my own region in Cork we have a number of them. It is really only a question of treating the matter as expeditiously as possible. We can get bogged down in representation. If the Government were being cynical they could say they have a majority in practically every county council and allow their own party to nominate the groups.
In the Cork and Kerry region there is no Government representative in it at all. The Chairman of the Cork County Council represents the Labour Party and a Progressive Democrat is the Chairman of the Kerry County Council. Cork Corporation is represented by a Fine Gael Lord Mayor. There is no Government representative on it. We are quite happy and satisfied that our chairpersons are capable of acting as a conduit back to the local authorities. Our council in Cork have had a meeting and we are having a collective meeting of all the members of the three groups within the next couple of weeks to allow our three representatives to come back and advise us. We must avoid getting bogged down in nitpicking.
When I saw the original concept I reacted exactly as Senator Bulbulia did and said we should have more local representation on these bodies but when I reflected further on it, I could see straightaway that we were talking about another year. I sat for six years on a regional development authority and we got bogged down regularly on quite trivial issues because of the polarisation of opinion — Kerry thought one thing, Cork people thought some other way, the Government representatives from the Departments of Finance and the Environment had other ideas. Gaeltarra Éireann, for example, who were very active in our group at the time were constantly at variance with us because they represented one small region in the total regional development area at that time. Whatever the composition of the committee, there will be a divergence of opinion. What is important is that we deal with the matter expeditiously. It is important for the peripheral areas of this peripheral region particularly in the light of the 1985-86 auditors' report for the region. If that plan is developed the rest of us will be swept into oblivion anyway. There will be nothing left for areas like the mid-west, the south-west and the peninsula areas of my own constituency. We are an outpost of Europe, shall I say an outpost of an outpost——
Poor things.
We are very deprived as a result and I know that. Having said all that, it is important that we have the kind of expertise that is on these various sub-regional groups to ensure that we do not get bogged down in trivia but address the real issues so that when these funds come onstream and we hope they will come onstream in 1989, the input of the local authorities will come into its own. We will for once in our lives have funds at our disposal.
The role I took upon myself when I became a member of a local authority was that of an unpaid servant to the people who elected me and my primary role was to endeavour to improve the quality of life in that area. That is becoming increasingly difficult because of the steady erosion of that role over the past 15 years but that role will very definitely become revitalised when these plans get into operation. In Cork and Kerry we have an exceptionally fine relationship with our county managers, our chairman and chairwomen. We have this very definite access to the various committees that exist.
It is important to expedite the debate and to ensure that our submissions are in place before the Commission by early 1989. We can only do that in the form that is at present suggested by the Government. It is the only way it can be done quickly and expeditiously.
Debate adjourned.
When is it proposed to sit again?
It is proposed to sit at 10.30 a.m. on Thursday, 8 December 1988.