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

I welcome the extra funding for the social inclusion and community activation programme, SICAP. A period of catch-up is needed to deal with the issues around poverty, disadvantage and inclusion within our communities, due to the savage cuts of the past ten years carried out by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.

I have concerns about the stand-alone community centres fund. It is something for which I and others fought long and hard in recent years, given the threat of closure of our local community centres in Hartstown and Huntstown. It does not state in the documentation that this is for non-local authority community facilities and I would be concerned lest this funding is not ring-fenced for those community centres that do not have access to substantial local authority funding. I commend the community activists and workers in both Hartstown and Huntstown who have done Trojan work to get this across the line. They are directly responsible.

I raise the issue of community services programmes, which are at serious risk due to the rise of the minimum wage which, of course, we welcome although it is not enough. However, the Government only provides funding of €9.39 for each member of staff. This will leave the community programmes with a large hole in their finances. They will have to find €1.11 per hour for each full time member of staff. Any chance that some of them had of getting to the living wage is now well and truly gone. I would doubt that many could subsume the 30 cents per hour increase and survive. Where are the supports for these 400 community companies and the thousands of workers who provide an absolutely vital service to people within our communities?

The funding increases are welcome. However, they are modest and far from the levels that are needed to catch up with the cuts of the austerity years and in the context of post-Covid Ireland.

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