Joe O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I agree with the Deputy that it is crucial we support communities that have experienced disadvantage and marginalisation for a long time and too long. The Deputy mentioned the Dublin north inner city model. We are in the process of developing a new policy with the Department of the Taoiseach in this regard to see how we can expand it.

That is in the pipeline at the moment but we are not waiting for that to be completed.

We launched a new programme this year entitled the empowering communities programme. It does what the Deputy did but maybe on a smaller scale. We identified 14 small areas which the data are telling us are the most disadvantaged areas in the country. They include rural areas as well, such as Ballinasloe town, one of the areas closest to the Deputy. We are resourcing the 14 areas with community workers and I would like to expand that into the future.

We have another programme running in two areas that we should be able to expand this year. The placed-based leadership programme in Darndale and Drogheda are running quite effectively. It brings community leaders together and encourages, facilitates and teaches collaboration, which does not happen enough on a cross-agency and cross-sectoral level of community development. We launched the new community development pilot programme last year and we hope to make a small expansion to that this year.

The social inclusion and community activation programme, SICAP tends to get ignored a bit. SICAP's funding allocation was €43 million in 2019 and this increased to €53 million under budget 2023. The programme's allocation is based on data and on the factual situation on the ground in terms of the areas that are most disadvantaged. It needs a bit of refreshing. With the latest census we will have the new data for SICAP at the end of next year. That will provide us with better data as we are currently working off data from 2016. On the new funding model for the community services programme I mentioned earlier, the larger allocations will go to areas of greater need. I am trying to do quite a bit at policy and programme level to make sure the communities that need more support are getting it and I will continue to do so.