Paul Donnelly (Dublin West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for his report earlier and for the open way we have engaged with each other since his appointment. I look forward to community-focused feedback. There will be times when challenges need to be addressed. While listening to the debate over the past few hours I was interested in and impressed with some of the comments about community development because they fit into my view of it. It is something at which I have worked for more than 20 years, both as a community representative and in my work with the HSE and Tusla.

Two things have been focused on today. One is community development, where it is going and where we want it to go. We have to look back before we go forward. The strongest time for community development was when we had people working in the community who were rooted in their communities and working from them. Unfortunately, there is now a retrenchment into bigger projects. I will give an example. In Dublin 15 we had community workers who worked directly in offices in the community centre. Some of them lived in the area and they all either drove or walked to the community centre, worked out of it and engaged with people every single day. That was an important piece of that community development and that has been lost in the past ten years or so. We also had local management committees of local people who directed the work of the community development workers and those have been lost as well.

I will give another example. I was a community representative for many years on the local drugs task force and we also had a community development worker on that task force. At the beginning, way back in the late 1990s when we established the local drugs task forces, we had huge amounts of energy and co-operation with both voluntary and statutory services. However, three of us resigned from the task forces in the past few years on the basis that the community is not being listened to. Sadly, Fergus McCabe recently passed away. He was an incredible advocate for community development but even he, and the CityWide project he was involved in with Anna Quigley, was utterly frustrated with the lack of community engagement from the statutory organisations, particularly the HSE. That is something that needs to be addressed. We need to get back to the community, to engaging with the community on the ground and working from the bottom up. That is the essence of community development. If we do not have that, we will have development but we will have no community. That needs to be addressed. If we can focus all our energies on that in the next number of years we can make significant changes to our communities.

I will mention this very quickly because time is pressing on. There has been an announcement regarding mutli-annual funding, which will be very welcome. As I have said previously, the community, charity and voluntary sectors need time and certainty to plan into the future.

The full cost of the delivery of services is another important aspect. Many community services are delivering a quality service but they are not getting paid the cost of the delivery of that service through their funding. Staff members are taken on at the same pay scale as that of the public service, yet when the cuts came during the recession, they were the first people to be cut, by up to 30% or more. They still have not gotten their money back, while the public service is getting full restoration of pay. That absolutely needs to be worked on.

On the community services programme, it is wrong that people are getting paid less than the minimum wage. We need to pay people. We need to give them money and enough funding to ensure the minimum wage. If there is an excess or a profit from a project, it should be used to get them up to the living wage or it can be put directly back into the community because these are all non-profit organisations.

If the Ceann Comhairle will indulge me, I will finish with a few statistics. They are important in terms of the amount of money we are talking about versus what is being delivered. There are 29,000 non-profit organisations and 60,000 volunteer board members, with a turnover of more than €14 billion. The sector employs 189,000 people and the direct and indirect value of the work of community and voluntary groups is valued at €24.5 billion. Next time we are doing budgets, can we please take those statistics into consideration?

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