Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

The Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs is not the lead Department with regard to migrant workers. However, since 2004 they have been regarded as a target group under the local development social inclusion programme, the LDSIP. The programme aims to counter disadvantage and to promote equality and social and economic inclusion through the provision of funding and support to local partnerships. It is administered by Pobal, on behalf of the Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, and is funded through the national development plan. At local level, it is delivered by 38 partnerships, 31 community partnerships and two employment pacts in their designated areas. The three measures it delivers are services to the unemployed, community development and community-based youth initiatives.

Under the LDSIP a significant number of area-based partnerships, community partnerships and employment pacts have developed actions to support migrant workers and their families. While many of the actions are still at an early stage, the partnerships can build on several years' experience in the programme of providing supports for refugees and asylum seekers.

Types of actions carried out under the LDSIP, with other agencies and programmes, to meet the needs of migrant workers and their families include helping ensure that migrants' information needs are met in appropriate ways, including in a variety of languages, arranging language classes that are accessible to migrant workers and their families, facilitating the participation of migrant workers and their families in intercultural events and their use of local amenities, community development processes to facilitate migrant workers and their families to take an active part in programmes and policies that affect them and anti-racism initiatives at local level.

Pobal, the Dublin Employment Pact, and the Migrant Rights Centre Ireland are supporting an action research project on local development strategies to meet the needs of migrant workers and their families. The research, intended to share practical lessons and to inform thinking about future strategies, will be published by the middle of 2006. As part of the cohesion process on local development the Department is extending the coverage of area partnerships to the whole State.

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