Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

On that point, some of the changes that are going to happen this year to the baseline funding for local authorities are going to be very important. Some local authorities have capacity for matching funding. For the ones that have grown rapidly in recent years - Laois would be a case in point as would Kildare and others - the baseline funding has not grown, so in actual fact the scope for looking for projects and putting in matching funding, retracts. This is inhibiting some local authorities. We should be looking at that in the context of this. If that is the impediment, it is giving a double advantage to areas that already have a baseline. Deputy Munster raised the fund for some of the schemes for people with disabilities and repairing and refurbishing housing this morning. Some of that has to do with matching funding as well. That is sometimes at the core of this problem, rather than the applications themselves.