Michael Ring (Mayo, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Deputy Curran speaks about this every time he is in the House and he is right about inner city Dublin. We have put €5.5 million this year on top of other funding as part of SICAP. That is joined-up thinking because there was a specific problem there that we dealt with. I hope we can run other pilot schemes. There is no doubt that the funding we put in place for inner city Dublin has really worked.

Let us consider some of the figures again. Some 15,923 people set up new businesses. Some 1,695 people from SICAP got into full-time employment. We dealt with 12,473 young people who were not employed. We are bringing together and working with local community groups. Deputy Curran is quite correct in that many of the schemes are tied in with SICAP, but SICAP is different because it deals with individuals and specific problems. It deals with different areas, including those relevant to Travellers, Roma and people who need further education. It is about giving people a chance in society. If we create the jobs we are creating and give people a chance and opportunity, then the programme works well. It does not matter to me whether we do it for one, 100 or 1,000 once we save one, help one or help numbers of people. The programme will certainly get people back into the workplace and society.

Sometimes I listen to people in rural Ireland talking about the difficulties we have. Sometimes I wish some of these people would go into the inner city in Dublin and other inner city areas to see what is going on.

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