Joe O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Briefly on the CSP, prior to this year the salary contributions to the 400+ community services programmes were on a flat rate. They all got the same contributions, whether they were one of the projects that had good revenue-generating capacity like the tourism ones that were mentioned, or a community centre in a deprived area. That was not ideal, particularly for the community centres in deprived areas. We restructured and there are three different layers of payment now. We got a budget increase in last year's budget in order to do that. We got €3.5 million in additional funding, which gives us the €52.4 million of steady funding this year to allow us to better support those community services programmes that have a higher need. We are growing it. We will be announcing 14 new projects in the next couple of weeks as well. We have a bigger group that we gathered when we opened the window for new applicants earlier this year. We are assessing them at the moment and we will be making announcements on them further into 2024.

We can look in a more flexible way at those projects that are already in the CSP and are looking for additional staff. We had issues last year with filling vacancies. There are quite a few vacancies across the CSP, but we are committed to growing it. We will be doing that in the next couple of weeks and next year as well.