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

The Deputy makes a number of good points. With smaller funds, such as the community integration fund, we keep the administration level down as much as possible because we want local groups like that to be able to apply for it, so we do our best to keep it as simple as possible. However, with higher amounts of money, when you are talking about hundreds of thousands of euro, a higher level of due diligence is required.

I also want to take the opportunity to acknowledge that tomorrow is 1 May. It is 20 years since EU accession when a lot of new member states joined. I think Ireland in particular benefitted hugely from that. If people look back on the statistics for the years following that tranche of accession in 2004, they will see the number of people who came into the country is quite similar to the number coming in over the last couple of years too. The EU has been good to us. EU accession has been good to us. A very large migrant integration project has happened over the past 20 years, starting in 2004, which should give us all encouragement for the challenges we face now, albeit very different ones.

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