Frank Fahey (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

The organisation in question is a registered charity and non-governmental organisation which received substantial grant assistance from my Department to undertake a locally based one-year pilot domestic violence intervention project. The purpose of the pilot project was to develop an integrated programme co-ordinating the work of the civil and criminal judicial systems and other key agencies such as the Garda, women's support groups, perpetrator programmes and the probation and welfare service in the Dún Laoghaire-Bray area. The project arose from research undertaken into the development of an intervention model which it was suggested had operated successfully in other jurisdictions.

The project originally received funding of €118,024 to undertake this pilot project within a year. Requests for additional funding were made by the organisation on a number of occasions to enable it to complete the pilot project. In the years 2004 and 2005 the NDVIA received additional funding of €320,000, bringing the total funding made available for the pilot project in the Dún Laoghaire-Bray area to almost €440,000. This is a considerable amount of taxpayer's money in my view for a pilot project.

My Department commissioned an external evaluation of the pilot project and while the findings of the consultants were reasonably positive, they identified a number of elements of the original project proposal which had not yet been satisfactorily completed. It was deemed important by my Department that these elements be completed and that the procedures developed by the NDVIA, under the domestic violence intervention project would be formally recorded so that the possibility of their replication in other areas might be fully considered.

My Department agreed to make a further and final amount of €90,000 available to the domestic violence intervention project to facilitate the completion of the final elements of this pilot project and the documentation of the procedures which had been developed as the key outcome of the project. It was agreed with representatives of the project that this work will be completed by the end of January 2007. I will not commit myself or my Department to any further funding activity arising out of this project pending receipt of a full report on its completion and an internal review by my officials of its outcome and conclusions.

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