Ms Adeline O'Brien:

I thank the Deputy. On community development, the local development company provides an infrastructure and there is a national infrastructure that allows and facilitates community development at grassroots level. I agree entirely with the Deputy that it is in areas of deprivation where we see a greater demand for services, even typical medical services. You see people in disadvantaged areas having to access services in twice the number as an average area. We see a huge continuing demand for community development engagement, particularly in areas of disadvantage. It is not that it is a replacing of grassroots or a suppression from the top down.

It is more about providing an infrastructure nationally that has tentacles in every small area of the country. It is about identifying those needs on the ground and supporting the people who live in that area to come together. We very often find, particularly in the Fingal area as the Deputy will be aware, that we have a very diverse community. A huge proportion of the people who now live in Fingal were not born or did not grow up in Ireland. The natural infrastructure we would have seen in communities fadó fadó does not really exist for many people. Those natural networks of support that would normally have been there do not exist for everybody.

We see a role in manufacturing a community development infrastructure and a national network of support for people, particularly those on the margins. It is about empowering those people to come together to form a critical mass in order that their voices can be heard. Once that happens through the SICAP programme, when we engage with groups the objective is to ensure they become sustainable and exercise and politicise themselves in their own way with their own voices. That is a core principle of what the local development company is doing, particularly with marginalised groups.