Mr. Niall ? Donnabh?in:

I appreciate the Deputy's commentary on Cork and the work we have been doing in the past number of years with the Traveller community across the city and particularly in Spring Lane. It has shown us that is the level of engagement needed to get to the heart of what is required. I hope it will bear fruit as we go through the process of Part VIII and beyond. It is a significant milestone in terms of the funding we have got from the Department. It is not an insignificant amount of money to provide for the first phase of Spring Lane and Ellis's Yard as a development option.

In relation to the loan scheme, we have given effect to 31 loans. We put ourselves forward as part of the initial pilot in 2021 with very few other local authorities. That has been rolled out over two successive periods in 2022 and 2023 at national level. To be fair to the Department and the Department of public expenditure and reform, that is being reviewed. We are happy to buy into and commit to that process because sometimes it has to be looked at on a case-by-case basis. Having a rule limiting the loan to €40,0000 or €80,000 is not really the answer. It is more to do with the specific requirement, which involves family size, conditions and the long-term plan or otherwise. Forty grand might be sufficient for the needs of a smaller family for a short period while a long-term proposal is being put in place, so it needs to be worked on that basis.

Because we were out front on this in 2021, it built a momentum and a buy-in from the families. That speaks to the amount of engagement we are having with the families. It is what is available at the moment and we are implementing Government policy. We have 29 applications in reserve, further to the applications allocated last year. In 2021, we had 15 and last year we had six. The difficulty is we started at a higher number, that raised an interest and, as a result, we have six allocated. We are always available to work with the Department on taking any additional funding or allocation available but for a city of Cork's size with all the families we need to deal with, there needs to be a degree of discretion on that which we can work on with the Department. We would feed that into any review going forward.