CLÁR funding to benefit small villages

Minister refocuses CLÁR funding to benefit small villages


Anton McNulty

THE future development of small sewerage schemes received a significant boost when the Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs announced a refocusing of the CLÁR Programme to help fund schemes in small villages.
Last week, Minister Éamon Ó Cuív announced that his Department intended to refocus the CLÁR Programme to meet the changing needs of rural Ireland. He said that water and sewerage programmes will be reprioritised to deal with the problems faced by areas which are dependent on individual water wells and which do not have a public sewerage system.
The CLÁR Programme was set up in 2001 as an innovative programme to deal with the infrastructural deficits in the most peripheral communities in Ireland. Programmes for roads, water, sewerage, schools and health services are amongst the programmes run under the CLÁR scheme.
Minister Ó Cuív said the lack of public sewerage schemes has meant that people are often refused planning permission in these villages and have to migrate to larger towns. This, he said, inhibited the development of whole areas and affected the services being provided in schools and in the area of health. To counteract this problem, consideration is now being given to changing the focus of CLÁR funding on public water and sewerage schemes to focus exclusively on the provision of small schemes in villages.
Minister Ó Cuív explained that where new sewerage schemes are being provided in small villages, the CLÁR Programme was now considering matching the local authority and Department of the Environment funding on a euro for euro basis.
“This should have the effect of giving a much better cost benefit analysis to these small schemes, and also facilitating the direct provision by councils of these schemes and the stretching of council resources considerably towards this end. I would hope through this scheme that a large number of the small villages that to date have not been provided with public sewerage schemes will now be able to progress and grow and that this would prove to be of great long-term benefit,” said Minister Ó Cuív.
However, the matching of funding will only apply to schemes costing less than €1 million and will not benefit schemes such as those proposed for Achill Sound or Belmullet. In order to direct funding towards the provision of sewerage schemes for small villages, Minister Ó Cuív said his Department will not be providing any further grant aid to the CLÁR scheme for the extension, upgrade or provision of public water schemes. However, he added that he will continue to fund the development of new group schemes in areas that are totally dependent on wells and hopes to be in a position to announce details of the revised measures in the coming months.
Minister Ó Cuív’s announcement was welcomed by Achill councillor, Micheál McNamara, who said there were a number of small communities in need of a sewerage scheme to attract people to settle there and that the matched funding would help streamline these projects.