The Just Transition Commissioner believes the EU need to relax some if its rules around funding for projects seeking money at a European level.
Kieran Mulvey was speaking at a special conference in Tullamore today organised by the Civil Society Organisations' Group of the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) in partnership with Irish Rural Link.
The Roscommon native believes that local groups and county councils need to come together to develop larger scale projects in order to draw down funding from the over 80 million euro available for communities looking to move away from peat production across Europe.
There has been growing concern in the Shannonside region that significant large-scale Just Transition projects have failed to materialise in the two years since the announcement of the Brown to Green strategy by Bord na Mona.
The industrial relations mediator believes bigger projects stand a better chance of success at a European level than community-based schemes
"We need to develop now, consortia, that will apply as groups rather than individual identification to the Europan Union and to that Transition fund so that we can attract reasonable funding for these projects, not bits and pieces.
We are an appalling rule based Europe. We need to loosen up the rules. I understand the importance of governance but we have over governance."
