Ms Anna Shakespeare:

I thank the Deputy for his questions. I will start with SICAP, which has two goals. It aims to support communities and target groups to engage with the relevant people who can identify and address some of their social exclusion and equality issues and to support disadvantaged individuals to improve the quality of their lives. It is underpinned by three horizontal principles: promoting an equality framework, applying a community development approach and developing collaborative approaches with stakeholders.

The SICAP programme applies a broader definition of disability than the Disability Act. It aims to target 13 different groups who are considered to be marginalised and who live in communities right across Ireland. Individuals with mental health difficulties were mentioned in particular. That is one of the target groups, and individuals with a disability. One of the really interesting things that has featured not as a mandatory component but as an elective component of the SICAP programme, and which has been implemented with great effect - I think it is being reviewed - is the My Journey tool. Where there is, for example, an individual that the Deputy mentioned, who has mental health difficulties and may be afraid to re-engage with society by virtue of their ill-health, who may be on a recovery journey and whose confidence is down on the floor, part of that journey is to document with them and support them towards a place where they even ready to consider re-engaging in the workplace.

Going back to the Deputy's point around the need for somebody to advocate for and work with them, the SICAP work is done very much on a one-to-one basis with the individual. As the Deputy knows, it is implemented really successfully by the local development companies in all areas of Ireland, and the success of the programme is certainly documented in the evaluations, the numbers that go through it, and some of the case studies that my colleague Paul might point us to, if that is helpful to the committee.