Ms Deirdre Kelly:

I will add to what Mr. Mulherin has said about the additional funding that has gone under the banner of the social inclusion programme to the Ukrainian population. The SICAP annual report is just being finalised at the moment and will be published shortly. It will give a much broader and more holistic sense of what is going on under SICAP. However, it certainly appears from the metrics to come in the annual report that there has not been any significant impact on other services, while recognising that there was been a significant increase in the services provided to both the Ukrainian population and also the population of other migrant cohorts. To give the committee a sense of it, the supports to individuals, who would be described under SICAP as new communities and which covers all the different cohorts, has increased from 13% in 2021 to 31% in 2022 and it is at 38% already this year. Therefore, it has increased significantly but the other metrics around other populations or other areas of support under SICAP have not decreased to the same extent. There are a couple of them that have decreased but there are other reasons for that. For example, the unemployment situation in the country is different now than it was in 2021 and 2022 and the supports are adjusting accordingly. Other than that, there really has not been any significant decrease in any of the other metrics under SICAP. As Mr. Mulherin indicated, the local development companies are doing absolutely amazing work on the ground in the context of social inclusion. This is the case under SICAP, under other programmes that are funded by various Departments, and other funding as well, and that continues to be the case. At the moment, we are about to go to procurement for the next iteration of SICAP which will start next year. We envisage that work continuing both with the indigenous populations and cohorts who SICAP normally works with but also with all new communities. The additional funding that was provided under SICAP for the Ukrainian community has been expanded now to include all international protection accommodation services, IPAS. It covers all new communities therefore that additional funding can be used for these as well. It appears to us from the metrics we have and we are confident that it is working well for the new communities but also for the other communities. Obviously, we never have enough resources and we could always have more but the ones we have are working well at the moment under the social inclusion banner.