Joe O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I do not want to stray out of my departmental remit. I will only say yes, we are looking at community employment.

On the Deputy’s initial question, the stability fund was our main response to community and voluntary sector for larger groups. A large number of groups were covered under that. The community services support fund was targeted particularly at groups funded under that stream, with groups that needed traded income, or relied on traded income to a fair extent. For example, many community centres using a social enterprise model were not able to generate traded income over the past while. Obviously, restrictions were lifted during the summer, but prior to that they had been suffering, which is why we added more to the support fund. There was a gap in terms of smaller community groups, and that is what the more recent community activity fund is targeting. That €9 million will be distributed by the local community development committees throughout the country. They will be small grants but they will be very effective in remobilising those smaller community groups throughout the country as well.

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