Senator Daly, you may continue. I apologise for the interruption.
NESC Report on Rural Development: Statements (Resumed).
It gave me an opportunity to refocus. I support the view expressed in the report about the necessity to undertake further research, especially into a balanced regional development policy. It is a reasonable comment but I am at a loss to ascertain the nature of our present regional policy. We do not have a regional policy of any significance and it is certainly not balanced.
It is difficult to argue at European Union level about dealing with regional imbalances when we cannot deal with regional imbalances in our own jurisdiction. We should, once and for all, set down clearly defined regions. The western partnership board has been established but it is necessary to put some type of regional development authority on a firm statutory footing and that has not been done. Instead, there has been a very haphazard approach.
We discussed a report here in the House a couple of years ago. Everyone concluded that it was a great initiative and that we should follow it up by establishing a statutory authority to give effect to some of its recommendations. There was a strong representation that there should be a Minister with that responsibility and the Government responded by appointing Deputy Carey who would do a service to our regional development policy if he were to introduce statutory responsibility for regional affairs.
There are elected regional bodies but they do not have the statutory responsibility necessary to undertake the work. They should be involved and the development organisations in each region should be answerable to those regional authorities as a basis for making an effective effort and establishing meaningful regional development policy. We should define the regions with reference to the existing elected regional personnel which require some statutory responsibilities.
These organisations need to be able to consult the various organisations involved in the region whether it be Telecom Éireann, An Post, Coillte or the Electricity Supply Board. Soon after I was elected some 21 years ago, a pilot study was carried out by Ray MacSharry on the co-ordination of State agencies and Government Departments which clearly indicated the overlap. This point was raised by Senator Byrne last night when he said one agency was not aware of what the other was doing.
The ESB dig up a main road to lay cables and the post office dig it up the following week to put down telephone wires. The week after that the county council could lay a sewerage scheme and then dig it up again to put down a water pipe. This daft situation has existed for a long time in this country. The local regional authorities which have been put in place should be given the function of co-ordinating the efforts of State agencies and Government Departments in an area to avoid the duplication which is costing millions of pounds. That funding could be put to better use providing the initiatives mentioned in this document.
Can anyone in their sober senses convince me that it is possible to stop the population decline in rural areas when one considers the chronic state of county roads? I attended a meeting in Carran on Monday night which was held in the dressing rooms at Carran GAA field. When we drove into the meeting the hall was surrounded by tractors because the people could not travel the roads in their cars. There was no possibility of walking. We had to make three detours between Ennistymon and Carran — a distance of a few miles — because of floods. There is no prospect of a resolution of this problem in the immediate future.
Members of local authorities are dissatisfied with the roads allocation they got from the Department of the Environment recently. We raised this with the last Government. I raised it with the previous Fianna Fáil Government and I raised it when I was in Government. We still cannot get a firm commitment from the "Dublin Government" to do something soon about the state of our county roads. The situation in relation to the county roads is a national disaster and should be declared as such.
Hear. Hear.
It is a scandal. People cannot go to church on Sundays and their children cannot get to their school buses. There are people in Carran who have been living in bed and breakfast accommodation since Christmas because they cannot get into their own homes.
The NESC report says we must have initiatives to enable some balanced regional development and that we must endeavour to find solutions to western problems. Surely to God the best initiative would be if this Government had the courage to say, once and for all, that it will set up some system or mechanism, whether in co-operation with local communities or in other ways, to tackle the scandalous state of our county roads and repair them so that people will at least be able to get in and out of their own homes. This is the first action we must take and we must do so soon. The time for talking about these things is well past.
Senator Mulcahy spoke about the necessity for modernisation. There is quite an amount of modernisation in western areas. For the first time in generations we are abreast of developments in matters such as satellite communications. We have the benefit of Horizon television in the most remote areas of my constituency. The Loop Head peninsula, which is the last stop before Boston, Massachusetts, has satellite communication and people are picking up CNN, Sky, Super Channel and a variety of other channels. The facility exists to modernise things so it is not all doom and gloom in the west.
The western rural region includes the most attractive areas in the European Communities. We have the most important national amenities including national parks in the Burren and Killarney. The west has the most scenic and attractive places people could visit in the European Community but we need assistance to develop them and bigger projects which will help the tourism industry. While the Leader programme, the western development initiatives and the small agri-tourism projects all help in their own way to provide employment opportunities, we need major projects which will attract big numbers and uplift all businesses.
I fully support the development of parks such as the national park in the Burren and I know the Minister of State, Deputy Carey, also supports it. I hope he will expedite the completion of the centre in Mullaghmore which will not damage the environment. I was appalled that the decision to go ahead with the project in Lugalla was rejected because some people in the locality wanted to protect the mountain from any intrusion or development. The mountain in Lugalla was planted 50 years ago, not by native Irish timber but by imported Norway spruce, sitka spruce and Norway pine. It is farcical for professionals to suggest that the mountain in Lugalla was never interfered with by man.
If we agreed to the decision about Luggala, which An Bord Pleanála and others want us to, then we would need to dismantle some of the mansions in the Wicklow area which are owned by people who are the principal objectors to this development. They want to preserve the mountain for themselves and they do not want a new centre to be built at Luggala because visitors might enjoy the scenery and that would spoil their enjoyment. They do not suggest dismantling their own properties which are not in keeping with the wilderness of Luggala mountain. I have heard enough nonsense about this matter.
It has been suggested that the Mullaghmore area is a wilderness. People lived in this area for thousands of years. The population is far less than it was 100 years ago. These issues must be tackled if we want to solve the problems mentioned in the NESC report. Will we invest in good projects where enterprise will be rewarded and where sustainable employment opportunities will be created?
I draw the Minister's attention to the provision of employment opportunities in small towns and villages, particularly in Kilrush where an industry which gave employment to 30 or 40 people was threatened with closure in the past few weeks and frantic efforts were made to rescue it. Jobs must be created in towns in rural areas, like Kilrush in west Clare which is losing jobs. Government assistance is needed to protect those jobs.
I appeal to the co-operatives which are investing millions of pounds in Mexico and in other countries thousands of miles from here to do something about this. It is questionable what benefit these investments will be for this economy in the long term. One co-operative, in particular, which I will not name but which the Minister knows, spent millions of pounds on a project in Mexico, but it would not put £100.000 into projects in Kilrush, where it gets some of its raw materials, including milk, to save 30 jobs there. It is time some of the bosses in our co-operatives asked themselves about their responsibilities to this economy. They lecture us on a daily basis about how we should manage this country's finances and tell the Minister how he should run his Department. However, they are short on commitment when it comes to supporting small industry in their regions.
I am sure they will not read the Official Report of this House, but they have a responsibility to the people in small industries who are crying out for investment in their businesses. These co-operatives should invest in towns such as Kilrush, Tralee and Listowel before they look to Mexico. We may need to get our priorities right, but some people in business also need to look at their priorities and make an effort to help to resolve these problems.
I wish to share my time with Senator Cotter.
An Leas-Chathaoirleach
Is that agreed? Agreed.
The Minister of State at the Department of Finance, Deputy Carey, is the ideal person for this position and I wish him well in the onerous task of trying to make the west a better place in which to live.
I welcome this detailed report which states in a number of places that better use should be made of local authorities. Members of local authorities will appreciate this. However, those outside the local authority scene do not seem to know what that means. Funds are not available for projects in counties Mayo, Galway, Leitrim, Sligo or Roscommon and the catalyst for those projects is the local authority. Local authority members are the only people who are accountable to the electorate. However, we are being stripped of our responsibilities.
A number of agencies represent County Mayo, including Údarás na Gaeltachta, area partnership boards, county enterprise partnership boards and local authorities and it also benefits under the Leader and IRD programmes. The Minister of State, Deputy Carey, the Minister of State at the Department of Foreign Affairs, Deputy Gay Mitchell, the Minister of State at the Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry, Deputy Deenihan, and the Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, Deputy Michael D. Higgins, have responsibilities in this area. Several Senators mentioned that our limited resources are used for administration by these agencies at different levels. I ask the Minister to co-ordinate their activities.
The report states that:
There are doubts about whether the County Enterprise Boards (CEBs) have the structure, resources and capability to formulate and execute enterprise development strategies for local prosperity. It will be important to observe the extent to which CEBs devote attention to key strategic activities in the coming years.
The County Mayo Development Team, one of the best teams in the country, has been replaced by the County Mayo Enterprise Partnership Board. Hundreds of jobs were created by the County Mayo Development Team under Mr. Sean Smith who was renowned for his development skills in the west. I have no doubt that the County Mayo Enterprise Partnership Board will play an important role in the development of the county.
The report also states:
2.9 The Council is concerned about the heavy reliance on grants in the various rural development schemes. For commercial projects there should be greater use of loans or other forms of repayable finance.
2.10 Property and the use of property are key factors in almost all kinds of development. This implies that Local Authorities have the ability to assist or frustrate rural and local development.
That further copperfastens what I said about the need to make greater use of the local authorities in each county. The catalyst for western counties should be the local authorities because they can obtain and attract funding, although they should be given greater powers to co-ordinate this with local communities.
The report is excellent and goes into great detail. A paper was launched recently by a Dr. Colm McCarthy and I notice that one of those who drafted the report is also a Dr. Colm McCarthy — whether it is the same man I do not know.
He is a man of many parts.
He was taken to task by Dr. Séamus Caulfield. For the last three years the western bishops have been highlighting the particular problems of declining rural populations in their dioceses and the need for urgent action to arrest that decline. Last year the publication of A Crusade for Survival and the setting up of a Government task force to consider the document led to a series of recommendations for action. Subsequently the Government set up a western development partnership board and the bishops set up a complementary council for the west to harness the input from the voluntary sector in development initiatives. More recently the new Government has appointed Deputy Carey as Minister of State for western development and rural renewal.
A leading Dublin economist has questioned the validity of the case that the rural west has extreme problems. In both a Sunday Independent review of A Crusade for Survival and a lecture delivered to the Merriman Summer School, Dr. McCarthy dismissed the western case by providing population and employment statistics, which he claims show the west performing as well as or better than the national average between 1971 and 1991. While many have rejected Dr. McCarthy's view, solely from their knowledge of what is happening, nonetheless his conclusions have attracted widespread media coverage. In recent months both Mr. John Waters and Ms Nuala O Faoláin have devoted columns to the McCarthy debate. While his conclusions have been challenged it has been assumed the statistics he published are authentic. A check on the source of the statistics on which he based his case shows they are not just biased and selective, as Mr. Waters said, but that the key statistics have been transposed in error, so that he has drawn conclusions diametrically opposed to what the real statistics indicate. When correctly assigned, the population statistics he uses demonstrate beyond a shadow of doubt that the problems of the rural west are more urgent than in the State generally. No one from the west has to be told its population and its services are declining and I take issue with Dr. McCarthy on this matter.
I am delighted the Minister addressed this in his contribution when he said:
The decline in rural areas due to population loss leads to the withdrawal or curtailment of necessary services such as post offices, ESB offices, bank branches, health clinics and county council offices...
The Minister sees the necessity in the most remote parts of the country to locate those services in "one stop shops".
I come from a county which could be a great tourism area but is one of the most underdeveloped counties in that regard. The current Minister for Tourism and Trade is from our county. He told us that on recent trips to trade shows in America, Germany and other countries, there were very few, if any, stands from the west. No one is selling tourism facilities north of Shannon in America or Europe. The Minister with us today should co-ordinate those agencies, or put in place a scheme so small hotels, guesthouses and even small companies can have a stand at those trade shows. County Mayo has nine blue flag beaches and the finest fishing lakes in the world.
They used to be.
An Leas-Chathaoirleach
There speaks a good judge of fishing.
They used to be and that issue is being addressed now.
I can tell the House about that.
Hopefully they will return to their former position, but we have those great assets. The Minister should consider putting a scheme together to sell this part of the country.
I congratulate the Minister on his appointment to this portfolio and I am happy to see him in the House. It was a rather symbolic appointment because it results from the Government's commitment to the west and rural areas in general. I look forward to the evolution of the various programmes to see what can be done by the Government. It is good to know there is at least a commitment and it is up to all of us to move it along.
Rural development is a recent phenomenon in so far as attention has only been drawn to it of late. It was always happening, sometimes in a negative and sometimes in a positive way. It was governed almost entirely by fluctuations in the Common Agricultural Policy. In the last few years we have seen a redesigned CAP and its impact is more questionable.
Rural economies feel more fragile than they used to and there is much more uncertainty. People are beginning to respond and some diversification is happening. Landowners are doing their best to change from traditional products, which are subject to quotas, to new products which are better placed in the market.
Retention of population in rural areas will be more difficult and will always pose problems. The east coast has a burgeoning population while other provinces and regions are losing population, as can be seen by anyone who checks the statistics. In Cavan and Monaghan the population has decreased over the last ten years and we must halt that.
The Minister Deputy Carey pointed out that when population decreases services are less available and in many cases disappear. That is a vicious circle because once services disappear people follow them. They leave for the centre where services are available. I welcome the "one stop shop" initiative the Minister announced, where services can be combined in a single building with less overheads, making it possible for the services to survive.
Development of the rural economy in Cavan and Monaghan could and should be used as a model for the rest of Ireland. The goods produced by landowners and the farming community are processed locally; the mushroom factory is a great example of this development. Mushrooms are grown in a "satellite growing" method in many places, taken to a central place for processing and brought to the market place. There is a huge turnover and many jobs have been created. That is a model that can be used by communities everywhere. Poultry is the same type of industry in which there is satellite growing and central processing. Now we are progressing to further processing and added value, thereby trying to create more jobs.
We have an incredible community in Cavan/Monaghan. It was probably necessity that drove us to such achievements in the poultry and mushroom industries. I am confident, to some degree, about the future there. However, there is much to be done and we need a great deal of support. In the past we have not received much support. Much of our industry is native and not grant aided. It is a credit to us that we have managed to achieve so much but we need support.
I wish to refer to community development, particularly in Border counties. Those counties benefited from the IFI which had a programme of giving priming grants to community groups and offering such groups assistance to carry out whatever work they believed was valuable and necessary in their areas. The IFI and Leader programmes have achieved a fantastic sea change in the attitudes of people throughout Ireland, particularly in Border counties where community groups have blossomed. Those groups are now getting tremendous confidence. The community gets together and elects a committee which decides, in a somewhat faltering manner, to carry out a little development. Thinking matures and they get used to the idea that they can do things for themselves. I know of communities that are preparing to make significant investments. The community development associations are replacing the old rural co-operative movement in job creation. Rural co-operatives did a massive job in the development of rural Ireland for 100 years. That role has been diluted because rural co-operatives are retrenching, reorganising and centralising. They are moving away from the rural areas they developed. That is a painful process.
However, the local development associations have the potential to become the new co-operative movement. I know through my involvement with these groups that they have the potential to make huge investments. Indeed, a number of groups I am working with are preparing to make investments costing millions of pounds. That development is growing out of necessity. We are losing population and there are no jobs in local areas. The people are standing up for their rights and emancipation is taking place all over the country. People are realising that they have power and they are prepared to use it.
I wish to outline to the Minister the problems that exist. A community decides, for example, to make a substantial investment. It might have to borrow £0.5 million to do so. However, the grant aid agencies are quite slow in making payments. If a contractor is involved, he or she must be paid at various times throughout the development of a project. If that person is not paid the project comes to a halt. That causes huge problems for community groups who are short of resources. The cost of carrying borrowings throughout the development of a project is huge. I want the Minister to address this problem.
Can we get a more efficient response from the grant aid bodies? Instead of writing the cheque six months later can we be given the cheque soon after verification that the work is done has arrived in the office? Can there be a quick response to prevent a drain of local funding into financial institutions? That is the big problem. I know communities that are willing to borrow £0.5 million or £0.75 million for viable projects before this year is out. What is happening is incredibly exciting. If the first efforts are successful they will be examples for other community groups to do likewise. We must support them and ensure that the initial efforts are successful. There are many people with skills and good ideas but they cannot get into business. The local development association can put them into business. I envisage a fantastic future for rural, town and village communities as a result of this process.
I wish the Minister good luck in his job. He has a major task on hand. He must co-ordinate a plethora of grant aiding bodies and programmes — it is frightening to look at the list. However, that is essential to the development of Ireland in a way that has never happened before. I look forward to continuing to be part of it.
I wish the Minister well in the task of western development and rural renewal. It is a task of immense magnitude. My only regret is that the Government did not create the Minister's portfolio when it was allocating the ministries rather than introducing it as an addition, so to speak. That is no reflection on Deputy Carey's ability. It is an immense task and will require not just the Minister's energy but the energy of the whole Government.
This report should be mandatory reading. Everybody in the Departments of Agriculture, Food and Forestry, Finance, the Environment and possibly the Department of the Marine — Departments that have anything to do with rural development and rural life — should be required to read this report. County managers should be required to read it as should politicians. In fact, the only people who probably are not required to read it are those who are involved in community work in local areas and rural development because they could have written it.
The report is a damning indictment of the lack of policy on the part of successive Governments in this area. The Minister said it emphasises the many positive initiatives which are already impacting on life in rural communities. There are positive initiatives although it must be said that most of them originated in Europe. However, chapter 7, which deals with past policies and policy perspectives on rural development, concludes:
Overall, this review of policy orientations and perspectives suggests that, while the various components of a comprehensive rural development policy have been identified at one time or another over the past 30 years, a clear and consistent approach within a well-articulated policy framework has not emerged.
Another chapter, which deals with diversification of the farm business, offers the same type of analysis and conclusions:
Strategies that can help stimulate entrepreneurship and generate opportunities for new work and income creation across a diversified set of sectors are needed if the continuity of many local communities is to be secured.
The chapter on services and infrastructures concludes:
Locational and reorganisation decisions, especially within the public sector, need to take greater cognisance of the interrelationships between the provision of public services — and of the implications of decisions to change them — for the State's policies to maintain rural population levels.
The following chapters make similar conclusions. The report is an indictment of the lack of policy and coherence in this area. Unless we come to terms with that and unless we overcome the interagency rivalries that have bedevilled rural life we will make no progress whatsoever.
The report is a catalogue of rural decline. Figures in the report state that in 1991 over 107,000 of the 160,000 farms in the country were not viable. Of the 107,000 there were only 27,000 farms on which spouses had an extra source of income to help maintain them. More tellingly, 30,000 have dropped out of the statistics. They have disappeared, not because they have gone out of business but because their level of economic activity was not sufficient to warrant their inclusion.
What sort of picture does that portray of rural poverty and rural decline? I suppose, it makes one mindful of Goldsmith's poem where he talked about "Ill fares the land, to hast'ning ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay". That was written a couple of centuries ago and seems to be as true now, or maybe more true, of the society we are living in and trying to develop.
The question then arises is rural depopulation an inevitability? Must it continue until the super highways we have built to the west bring the people out of the country and allow the tourists to look at the few curiosities that are left? Is that the scenario? I suggest it is not necessarily the scenario provided the intervention takes place because the report tells of a population turnaround in the 1970s where the pattern of decline was arrested. Why was that the case? The reason was we joined the Common Market and there was a rapid increase in incomes and people had some reasonable level of prosperity. That is what it is all about. It is creating the conditions in which people can live, work and create wealth in the rural areas because, unless we do that, whatever other measures we introduce are only stopgaps. When they have given the five or ten year breathing space we go back to the original problem, the people leave and then we wonder if the investment was worthwhile in the first place. I would say it is worthwhile because the underlying problem, and it is referred to in the report, is unemployment in society as a whole. What happens these people who are forced to leave rural communities and the land and where can they find alternative employment? That is the conundrum that faces the Government and the European Union. It is probably better, even from a purely cynical economic point of view, to spend the money keeping the people in rural areas rather than putting them on an over-supplied labour market and having them live in urban ghettos. The point I want to make is that the decline need not necessarily be irreversible, and if there is profit and economic activity, it is possible to turn it around.
There seems to be a presumption that this rural malaise is confined to the west. That is not the case. It is a much wider decline and again that is underlined in the report when it talks about what happened in the midlands in the 1980s when it became another problem area.
I had not intended to talked about the co-ops but the issue was raised and I need to respond. Senator Daly, in particular, seemed to believe that co-ops have some responsibility to return to the practice of taking in milk at the crossroads in cans and that they should take on their social responsibilities. The most effective way the co-ops can ensure they fulfil their social responsibilities, of which they are aware, is to create the international businesses that can live in a highly competitive environment. I have no criticisms of Kerry Group plc or anybody buying businesses in the United States, Australia or Britain which will give them the economic mass that will allow them to repatriate money earned abroad. In this country, we always talk about the effect of bringing international business and manufacturing companies which repatriate their wealth. Let us have a few companies abroad repatriating the wealth they create there so that we can look after rural society in the way it should be and give a return to the farmers who produce goods for those co-ops. I see that as the way forward and it was articulated to us by the co-operative movement at the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation last week. Let us be clear about what it is we require of our co-ops.
Senator Cotter referred to the traditional function of the co-op in terms of its local social responsibility, that is, through community effort and activity linked to the co-ops. There is plenty of evidence of that in the Leader groups. Many of the more successful Leader groups have the co-ops as a driving force, particularly in the west, the one in Mayo and Sligo, where NCF are involved; there is the one in the area of the Barrow, Nore and Suir where Avonmore plc are centrally involved; there is another in west Cork where the cattle breeding society are involved. It can be done but let us not stifle the co-ops in their economic activity. It must be 25 years ago when the late Brian Daly, the manager of Lough Egish Co-op, remarked that co-ops have two functions: one is social and the other is to make a profit, but if they do not make a profit they cannot fulfil the first function, and that is as true today as it was when he said it. I was led into that alley because of Senator Daly's intervention.
The report points to serious deficiencies in training and in statistical backup in terms of defining and knowing the problem. They are within the Government's ambit to sort out and address. The Minister made the point that the report calls for further research, and that is true. It is evident that there is no national policy in respect of rural development. What has emerged is a policy which originated from the European Union as a result of CAP reform. The drive behind the rural development policy, such as it is, is from the European Union, the farm organisations and the people on the ground but not from the Departments of State and not from the Government, and maybe not even from the Opposition parties. My view is that rural policy must embrace more than farming. It is frequently confused with farming — obviously farming is central to the rural problem — but it has to be taken in a broader context. We have to look at rural society as an entity in terms of the local village, the local shops and the local services and the farming community. Until we look at rural policy in that light we are only tinkering at the edges.
Rural development has become almost a conference circuit. Members of local authorities know that any month there will be a conference somewhere on rural development and rural employment. I wonder how much money has been devoted to the conference circuit. The people who go on the conference circuit drive nice motor cars, live in nice houses, probably mortgaged, but they are comfortable. It is nice for them to talk about the problem but it does not achieve anything. Let us keep the focus where it belongs — on the people on the ground.
There is huge energy and enthusiasm, there are ideas bubbling up all over the place. The Leader programme has shown the capacity of rural communities to help themselves. It is only a case of giving them the power. I see little evidence that the political establishment at county council level, or at any other level, is prepared to give that empowerment to local communities to help themselves. It has to be a partnership. The county council or the other levels cannot be excluded but I frequently see where that partnership is not working because somebody somewhere has to hold the reins and they will not give the people who know what is happening on the ground the power to go ahead and do the job.
One of the benefits of Leader is that the applications were made locally and the local board made the decision as to how the money would be spent. Now under the county enterprise partnership boards, there is a similar set-up in terms of allocation of funds. What happens? Decisions are made in the Department of Enterprise and Employment. That does not make sense. Senator Daly is right when he says we have a multiplicity of agencies competing with one another. People are confused. They do not know where to go. One positive aspect is the services centres. They would steer people in the right direction. It is something I commend and I hope it will happen quickly.
Sitting suspended at 1 p.m. and resumed at 2 p.m.