What the Deputy says is music to my ears and mirrors my general thinking on these matters. I am somewhat old-fashioned in thinking we need a fairly simple streamlined system of Government. With only 4 million people, every citizen has access to all of us as Members of the House. All these tiers only complicate the issue.
I would like to focus on how we will spend the €4.5 million, over which I will have direct control as it is Department money. I had a very fruitful meeting with the AIT co-ordinators. When I examined all these plans there were many small issues. There were housekeeping issues over maintenance of local authority estates and safety issues over the provision of CCTV cameras or speed ramps to prevent so-called joyriding. There were other issues involving small sports projects and areas of rough ground that young children were using for cider parties, etc. Those issues should be addressed. They are in all the plans. To ask a Department to process those is undermining the AITs.
Somewhat similarly to CLÁR, I intend to use these moneys and ask the AITs to provide a menu of the items that are repeated in the plan as exists in CLÁR. The AITs should decide what to choose from the menu. As with CLÁR there should be matching funding, which would mean that the €4.5 million could leverage €10 million or maybe €15 million worth of action in one year. If this were done over two or three years we would see considerable difference on the ground. The beauty is that it deals with the small ones. It shortens the list of items that have to be handled by the Departments.