Kieran O'Donnell (Limerick City, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I acknowledge the work the Senator and I have done together. She is a very good representative for both the Travelling community and the wider community. I might touch on a couple of themes. Obviously, I will leave the more detailed work on Traveller accommodation to the committee, but the funding significantly increased in 2023 on the previous year. One issue I wanted to see happen on a practical level was that every local authority would spend money on capital funding last year, and it was the first year that happened. I felt that was a practical measure.

Second, where Travellers are in local authority accommodation, that could come in the form of settled housing, an official halting site or whatever. If they are tenants of the local authority, there is nothing to prevent the local authority, even in the case of an existing building, from applying to the Department for funding to adapt the accommodation for people with disabilities, which it should do. That is a given. The funding is there, and if the Senator is aware of particular cases, she should tell the local authority to apply. That is something we feel strongly about.

The Senator referred to playgrounds, which are a general issue. One should always acknowledge the work of colleagues but I am conscious there are two aspects to this. The Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, and the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth brought forward a capital grant last year whereby they provided a grant to local authorities to ensure playgrounds would be disability friendly. I am looking at this within my Department as well. It is arising on the ground and we are all practical politicians here. Playgrounds are a huge issue and disability-friendly playgrounds are just as big an issue. It is very important.

The Senator commented on future-proofing. When I came into the Department, a national strategy for people with disabilities had been published. My area falls under housing. Work had been ongoing within the Department to come up with an implementation plan. We could have published it straightaway but I wanted to be certain it was in real time, so we did a great deal of work with officials to make it absolutely up to date. Many of the actions had started, or about 25% of them, and that is in the report. We now have a structure and we ultimately have to work off that. We have an implementation plan and a strategy up to 2026. That is being implemented through the local authorities, and within each local authority there is a housing and disability delivery group comprising the local authority’s director of services, the HSE, and representatives of people with disabilities themselves and various other organisations. They produce a quarterly report for a national implementation steering group, which is chaired by the Housing Agency. We then receive those reports and monitor them.

I have been in office for a relatively short period but this is all about discernible actions. We have 107 actions and they have all been started at some level. I want to judge this on actions. About 28 of the 107 are about 75% complete and probably a further 21 are 50% complete. We will carry out a review of the overall strategy this year and, in addition, there will be an annual report. As to how we will future-proof everything, we will keep pushing forward with the action plan, the implementation plan. We will keep ensuring we get proper data, which is why I want to get the data from the local authorities on how many people they are housing under their funding schemes. They get the funding directly from the Department through the social housing investment programme, SHIP, and, in addition, the approved housing bodies get funding under a different stream. The approved housing bodies are already giving us data on the number of people they have housed, but I want to get the data also from the local authorities.

Overall, 2,372 people, which is 15% of the overall number, were housed by local authorities and approved housing bodies last year. The Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, is also doing work on the 2022 Census to allow us to work off up-to-date data. It is simple. It is all about updating the strategy, driving the implementation of the plan and checking every quarter whether they are meeting targets.