Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael)
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187. To ask the Minister for Environment, Community and Local Government if and when further funding in respect of a disabled person's grants will be made available to Kildare County Council; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [32818/13]

Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick City, Labour)
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On 22 February 2013 I announced capital allocations to local authorities under the suite of Grants for Older People and People with a Disability amounting to €42.750 million. This year I allocated local authorities the full amount of their contractual commitments, which in the case of Kildare City Council amounted to €1,723,752. The balance of the available funding was allocated on the basis of each authority’s share of the new applications on hand in January 2013. This brought Kildare County Council’s overall allocation to €2,025,000.

A small capital reserve was set aside to deal with any acute or particular difficulty which might arise in the operation of the schemes over the course of the year. Following requests from 13 local authorities for supplementary funding, I subsequently approved additional allocations totalling €1.2 million. Through active management of my Department’s overall housing budget for 2013, I am now in a position to allocate additional capital funding to the grants measure. All local authorities will benefit from the increased provision and I intend to notify authorities of their increased allocations by the end of the month.