Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank everybody for being with us today. I will take a slightly different tack. Ms Hurley will probably know from some of the parliamentary questions I have been asking that one of my focuses is to see whether we are getting the balance right in terms of funding for rural Ireland and for urban Dublin, particularly those parts of urban Dublin where there are significant levels of disadvantage. I cannot say there is not a strong commitment to those areas because only this week €47,000 was granted to support family carers to the Finglas Counselling Service, funding has been given to the national Rediscovery Centre, which is based in Ballymun, and the social inclusion and community activation programme, SICAP, is a significant commitment to tackling disadvantage. I was chair of the local community development committee, LCDC, from 2014 to 2016. I was part of all of the SICAP tendering process etc.

It is a broader question. Ms Liz Canavan, assistant secretary in the Department of the Taoiseach, is reviewing how we can tackle the issue of disadvantage and how we can expand the North East Inner City Programme sustainably. The Taoiseach has a desire to try to tackle child poverty in particular. While I understand why they would be operationally separate, I think they are linked. The Ballymun - A Brighter Future report by Mr. Andrew Montague makes for very interesting reading. Many people have considered it already. It talks about the role of Tusla and the HSE in many of those communities.

We have the community safety partnerships, which will augment the joint policing committees, JPCs. They are not dissimilar to the area-based partnerships which were set up in the 1990s, and we need to question why the HSE, Tusla and the education and training boards, ETBs, to some degree are not as active in those bodies as they were in the past. Part of that is we have turned those partnerships into service delivery vehicles, and in some cases that is because of the relationship Pobal has with them. They have specific targets, they have contracts, they have memorandums of understanding, and their ability to respond to need in the area and to convene agencies has been diluted. That was done, most obviously, when we removed councillors from the boards of area partnerships.

I say to Ms Hurley that I will keep knocking on her door about trying to address this issue. There are many other people dealing with it. In fairness, everybody is. I joke at the Minister, Deputy Humphreys, saying she is the Minister with responsibility for community and rural affairs as though they were separate, but there is a real issue of disadvantage in urban areas. If we are looking at the rise of the far right, it is those communities that are being targeted, not only in Ireland but in every part of Europe. We need to tackle disadvantage in a very serious way. While cities can be very large, pockets of disadvantage are villages and they are no different from any other village around Ireland. That is one area. I would be interested to hear Ms Hurley's thoughts on that and the work she might be doing with the Department of the Taoiseach.

The second question I have is in regard to the administration of some of the grants. In 2014, grants such as the community facilities programme, which is a really good programme, were allocated to the LCDCs. There were huge difficulties that the same batch of funding was being given to every LCDC, regardless of size. That has been corrected slightly. We still have a long way to go. Dublin has a huge population compared with some LCDCs, and the fact they were getting similar allocations originally was wrong. There has been some correction now for that.

However, the administration in those larger areas is a difficulty. If we are to administer a fund of €200,000, we will get 200 or 300 applications because of the scale and size of the city, and the process of managing those is difficult. Then there are different funds over the course of the year and you might get funding at the end of the year that other counties cannot spend because we know there is a need in Dublin and they will get it. We need to look at how we can co-ordinate those together, that we can give a chunk of funding at the beginning of the year - I understand the Department does not want to get into core funding - and that, with that local authority, particularly Dublin City Council but it could happen with others, there would be an agreed process where an open call for funding is put out and then the local authority could assess the applications under the different criteria under the different grants.

Those are a few suggestions. I will give Ms Hurley the other half of the slot to answer them.