Dáil Éireann Debate, Thursday - 17 January 2019
241. Deputy Éamon Ó Cuív asked the Minister for Rural and Community Development the amount of prepayments made in 2016 to local authorities for work which has not been carried out to date; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [2158/19]
View answerAs the Deputy will be aware, my Department was not established until July 2017. That said, there were some pre-existing programmes, including a number of Rural Schemes, which my Department now has responsibility for, some of which are listed in the following table.
In 2016, pre-funding of approximately €28 million was released to the Local Authorities in respect of four Rural Schemes, see the following table.
On 13 September 2018 I wrote to each Local Authority advising them that all of the 2016 projects were to be completed and closed off by the end of September 2018 and that any unspent monies were to be returned to my Department. As of 30 September 2018, there was a reported spend of €26.6m on these schemes. This equates to 94% of the allocated funding. I advised the Local Authorities that any outstanding costs required to complete the projects would have to be met from within their own resources.
Funding allocated to Local Authorities under Rural Schemes in 2016
|
Scheme |
Funding Amount |
Funding spent by 30 Sept 2018 |
% spent by 30 Sept 2018 |
|
REDZ |
€6,142,842 |
€5,668,633 |
92% |
|
Town and Village |
€9,880,000 |
€9,599,123 |
97% |
|
CLÁR |
€8,238,867 |
€7,882,779 |
96% |
|
Rural Recreation Scheme |
€4,130,154 |
€3,469,456 |
84% |
|
Overall |
€28,391,863 |
€26,619,991 |
94% |
