Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

My view is that the child poverty unit and the unit dealing with the roll-out of the north-east inner city model cover much of the same work. I welcome the Cabinet’s decision today to establish a task force for Ballymun which will be chaired by John Costello, formerly of the Dublin GAA county board. I thank the Taoiseach, Deputy Varadkar, and the Tánaiste, Deputy Martin, for their support in delivering that. It will make a difference in our area. I call on them to ensure that senior civil servants will be present and will engage with the task force, as we have been promised. We want to ensure that issues that are unique to our area are addressed, like the provision of early school leaving solutions, the recruitment of senior social workers, open drug dealing blackspots and the designing out of places of antisocial behaviour. These are all issues that I know the Taoiseach wants to solve. I ask that decision-makers from the Civil Service, the national agencies and An Garda Síochána will be part of that task force.

Again, I thank the Taoiseach for his work and for the allocation of the nearly €2 million that has been made available to the Department of housing and similar funding for Dublin City Council. It is a fantastic step forward today. I again ask the Taoiseach to continue to be available to the community of Ballymun. In his constituency and in mine, I know there will be other communities looking on and saying that they would like to have an area-based intervention in their area. It is a positive and I would ask us to continue to roll it out.

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