Róisín Garvey (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Department. With all the stuff we have been dealing with, it has done very successful work. There have been increases in social welfare payments, fuel allowance and the living alone allowance. I see a lot of funding coming to community and voluntary groups in my county. I cannot keep up with the demand for help to fill out forms for funding because there is so much available at the moment for community and social development, so I thank the Department for that. Especially for towns in Clare where there are Ukrainians, huge sum of money are available through SICAP and other organisations. Our towns will be better off because of the new infrastructure for which we can get funding. I am very grateful for all that.

Are any or all of the sustainable development goals considered when the Department puts funding together? I do not know if it is fair to say the Department is only responsible for three of them. The idea was that the SDGs would be taken into account by all Departments. I do not see them mentioned in applications. Is that something we could look at to embed them more so that some of the SDGs are always being dealt with when we allocate funding? Is any mechanism in place for officials to examine new policy proposals through an SDG lens and to identify how policies are advancing Agenda 2030 or, conversely, possibly undermining SDG progress?

Where has there been progress in advancing the SDG and Agenda 2030 within the Department? Is there a way of measuring this progress? Is the Department using the indicators provided in the SDG framework? A number of countries, including Finland and Denmark, have developed SDG indicators relevant to their national context. Is this something the Department is considering? The Department is brilliant but it cannot continue as business as usual because we have this commitment to the SDG now. If we have that commitment, how do we implement it, measure it and make sure we are engaging with it fully?

No one has mentioned the huge issue around climate that we face in communities and rural areas. What I see from severe weather patterns in the past is that all the resources needed to help people who live in vulnerable areas in rural areas is put into the cities and towns. Friends and others who work in Civil Defence say they often have a hard time getting into the town or city to locate the resources that are needed to go back out to the country to help people who are trapped by flooding or snow. This is something we will face more and more. I would like to see the Department thinking in that way about the climate emergency and the severe weather patterns. These kinds of events will be happening more often. Will the Department alleviate some of my fears around this?