Helen McEntee (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Everybody supports the idea of funds being taken from criminals and put directly back into the communities they impact. I was really pleased to be able to set up this fund. In the last two years it has gone from €2 million to €3 million to €3.75 million this year and obviously I want to see that increase further.

The overall objective of the fund is to support community safety. That can come in the form of many different ways. It is really important that it is not used to substitute other Departments' sources of funding. That was one of the biggest challenges we faced in the first year or two years of applications where people obviously had a gap in a particular service, they had not been given the funding from another Department - I do not want to single out a Department - and their application was specific to something that is already funded. We have been very clear that this not what the fund is for. We want new and innovative ways to look at and be able to address safety in communities.

It is two years in and we now need to evaluate the types of projects that have been given funding to see how they have worked or where people have maybe fallen down in their application. While they were not outreach events there were specific meetings that were opened up to anybody to join so the officials in my Department could outline the parameters of the applications and what types of funding projects they could apply for. Where people were unsuccessful there was feedback afterwards as to why they were not successful. It will take a little bit of time for it to bed down as a new fund but certainly in the next tranche of funding I will do everything I can to reach out to community organisations that were unsuccessful the last time. In the second round there were groups that got funding that had not been successful the first time. We worked with them to make sure their project fit within the parameters. There is a lot of really fantastic work going on out there with communities but I do not want to replace other sources of funding because it is supposed to be a once-off. It is supposed to set up something that can then progress itself. Obviously if one gets into funding a staff member, a HSE member or otherwise it defeats the purpose of the overall fund. We are happy to engage with organisations or communities that want to use the fund.