Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

One thing we did previously was to give €100,000 to every area implementation team under the RAPID programme. It was not a Traveller-specific programme, but it obviously included areas where there was a high proportion of Travellers. The idea was that it was controlled by the community representatives as well as the rest of the members. There was kind of a double sign off. The whole committee had to sign off, but it had to be separately signed off by the community representatives. The idea was that if there were a band in an area, it would have the money to buy equipment or uniforms or whatever was needed, or if there were different activities and so on. It would be interesting to get the view of people involved in education, even if it were only qualitative and not necessarily quantitative.

Is one way to address to whether children perform better if they have access to a reasonable amount of organised after-school activity through discretionary funds? This is where the Dormant Accounts Fund comes in. The funding was provided from it and we can do things with Dormant Accounts Fund money that we cannot do with mainstream money. It was mainly not meant to substitute for mainstream funding, which is unfortunately what happened to national lottery funding over time; it was meant to go into the kind of things we would not normally do with mainstream funding. That is one way we might be able to look at this. It would be interesting if the witnesses could give us feedback on the correlation between performance in school and activity out of school, even if it is only anecdotal, because often that often gives one a good flavour for things.

With that, I appreciate the witnesses' attendance and their listening to all the points we made and responding in such a comprehensive way. I thank members for their contribution.

I now adjourn the committee until 11 a.m. on Thursday, 18 April 2024 which we will have a public meeting in the Seanad Chamber entitled Give Travellers the Floor. With that, cuirim an cruinniú seo ar athló.