Grace O'Sullivan (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I acknowledge the contribution of Senator Ruane because it is true that community development is an area on which this committee has not focused. We do not have a definition of what that means for us. We sometimes focus too much on rural and do not look at community in terms of urban communities.

I draw the Department's attention to a recent ESRI report on SICAP. One of the points made was that there is a need for a broader conception of community development. A further point made in the report is that one of the weaknesses of the current model is that it is centralised. The community development programme model was focused more on the community, empowering communities and the ground-up community approach as opposed to the top-down method, which may not be beneficial to sustaining communities in the long term.