Joe O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Green Party)
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I thank the Deputy for his question. My Department’s mission is to promote rural and community development and support vibrant, inclusive and sustainable communities throughout Ireland. The underlying basis for all funding delivered through my Department's community development programmes is to enable communities to identify and address their own needs in this context. In effect, the objective is to empower communities to represent themselves and get involved in addressing the challenges they face.

The social inclusion and community activation programme, SICAP, is the Government's foremost social inclusion initiative. It is a national programme overseen by my Department that aims to reduce poverty and promote social inclusion and equality by supporting disadvantaged communities and individuals. Delivered in both rural and urban areas by local development companies, LDCs, the supports provided are based on needs identified at a local level.

As the Deputy will know, the new iteration of SICAP covering the period 2024 to 2028 has commenced. A key policy initiative of the new programme is to strengthen the role of SICAP in regard to pre-development work with communities. In contrast to SICAP 2018 to 2023, there is now a dedicated core area of work called community animation, which focuses on building capacity in community representative structures, establishing new community groups and social enterprises, and empowering communities to lead out on identifying their own needs.

In addition to SICAP, my Department also supports two other programmes that engage with particularly disadvantaged communities, that is, the community development programme and the empowering communities programme. In particular, the latter aims to enhance community access to key services and empower local communities to craft their own response to area-based poverty and the resulting consequences with the support of their local community development committees, LCDCs. My Department has overall responsibility for both the LCDCs and the public participation networks, PPNs. These are important structures at a local level with a range of responsibilities, including supporting the engagement of community organisations in decision-making.

Joe O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Green Party)
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Decisions on particular allocations for the community animation aspect of SICAP are rolled out to the local development companies. Based on the need presenting to them, they will decide what level of worker should be involved. It is the individual community worker who is engaged under SICAP. The programme is responsive in that sense. There is no set, defined allocation by central government as to what sum goes to community animation. All the local development companies have their particular allocations for the length of the programme and, within that, they respond and make decisions based on local needs.

On expenses for groups like community councils and so on, we generally have an annual process for allocations. Last year, it was done through the local enhancement programme, previously called the community enhancement programme. Again, allocations are given to the local authorities and the latter - in this case, the LCDCs - make the decisions about who gets the small grants. This is the most direct way for us to support small groups like that with their operating costs.

Joe O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Green Party)
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It is important to mention the PPNs in this regard. In many respects, they are the most comprehensive network of community and voluntary organisations around the country.

We fund their support workers as well to build their own capacity. I do not want to leave the PPNs out of this discussion because they are playing a key role. I also do not want to leave out the empowering communities programme either. It is a smaller programme, which contains 14 projects at the moment. We hope to expand it a little bit this year. It is specifically based on those small areas around the country that are literally the poorest. We have used the Pobal deprivation index to identify them.

There will be other communities, particularly new ones where new estates have started up where there may not necessarily be a representative community council. However, those that are not the poorest tend to be able to self organise more quickly, in my experience.

Our SICAP, PPNs and ECP programmes are particularly focused on those communities that are more deprived in terms of the Pobal deprivation index. We get an annual report on SICAP performance is another answer to the question.