Protecting Rural Ireland: Motion
Seanad Éireann — 2026-07-15
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Cathal Byrne (FG), Cultural and Educational Panel

I welcome the Minister to the House. I will also be supporting the countermotion.
I will make a couple of brief points in relation to the Department. I very much appreciate the high level of activity that the Minister has brought to the role since he took it up and the many visits he has made to my own home county of Wexford. These successful visits have been an opportunity for the Minister and his officials to meet and engage with so many of the people who make up the real fabric of the rural community right across south Wexford.
I wanted to speak on that theme about CLÁR funding and the opportunities that currently exist in CLÁR funding for emergency first-responder groups. I recently met with a group of first responders in the Kilmore community first responders. They explained to me that their role is to be contacted through the emergency services when somebody has a cardiac event, in particular, in that small rural peninsula on the Wexford coastline. They said that in many instances they arrive on the scene before the emergency paramedics and the ambulance service arrive. As a result, in many instances they are the people who are applying the defibrillator pads to the patient. We are very fortunate that the CLÁR scheme has been extended to Wexford. The scheme, as currently constituted, provides such groups with the ability to access a vehicle, which would be essential if they were the Coast Guard, mountain rescue or a different group like that, but unfortunately it does not provide support for the day-to-day cost of these pads. They have said to me that when you put the pads on, you cannot take them off and put them on to somebody else, and that they are one-use only. They are not reusable. The pads can cost several hundred euro. They are running quite a lot of fundraisers just to get access to the pads. I ask that in the next round of CLÁR perhaps the Minister and the Department could look at some sort of grant scheme for those individual defibrillator pads. They are not asking to be funded for the day-to-day work that they do. They are not asking to be funded for any other ongoing costs they have but it is a capital cost in the sense that this is much-needed equipment. The CLÁR scheme that is there for these first responders covers the cost of a high-profile high-level defibrillator machine but these are the handheld portable ones that they bring out on the scene as the first responders. I ask that the Minister and the officials might take a look at that.
The second matter I want to speak about is the enormous success that the community centres investment fund has been. I wonder whether there is an opportunity for perhaps an amount of money that is currently too big for the community enhancement scheme and too small for the overall community centres investment fund. I am talking about projects, such as if you need to put in a full new floor in a community centre, that are too big for the €5,000 grant and are not necessarily major capital projects that will cost €100,000 plus. Is there an opportunity there for a new tier that would capture some of those projects? A lot of the groups that I have engaged with are a little daunted by applying for the main fund because they do not feel that it applies to them. Maybe it is the case that they should be putting in for that, but perhaps there is an opportunity to have a second tier there.
I commend the work the Minister and his officials, who I see are here this evening, are doing.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-07-15/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:52:16+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-07-15