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Cork has been "badly served" in the latest round of Leader funding, despite the county receiving the highest allocation in the country, according to West Cork Development Partnership CEO Ian Dempsey.
Mr Dempsey said that Dublin will receive more funding for rural development projects than west Cork.
Of the €250 million of funding announced by Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government Alan Kelly this week, Cork is to receive €13.9 million. This is down from the €49.2 million it was allocated in the previous round, from 2007 to 2013.
Leader funding for west Cork, covering an area of 80,000 people, has been cut by 66 per cent to about €5 million.
The problems facing communities in greater Dublin are not comparable to those in west Cork, according to Mr Dempsey.
“I don’t think anybody could equate . . . the issues in rural Dublin in terms of economic and community need, to a peripheral area such as west Cork,” Mr Dempsey said.
Leader funding was a primary factor in the development and delivery of the West Cork Development Park, which provides employment for almost 1,000 people.
‘Village renewal’
Announcing the funding, Mr Kelly called for future projects centred on “village renewal”.
“It could be many things, in terms of community facilities, halls, village enhancement around streetscapes and vacant places. But that has to be driven by the community.
“I would dare to suggest that the problems in terms of village renewal are far deeper than the Leader programme, of itself, can address. If you talk to communities around core challenges they have, they talk about the need for the local authority to better support the greater value to be achieved in terms of the rates paid by people and commercial businesses that live in these places.”
Mr Kelly said there would be a move away from “money being spent on areas like books, research, marketing strategies that may not be sustainable into the future, towards the development of actual infrastructure”.