Tommy Broughan (Dublin Bay North, Independent)
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431. To ask the Minister for Social Protection to reinstate funding to Inclusion Ireland for the walk peer project; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [9449/16]

Thomas Pringle (Donegal, Independent)
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467. To ask the Minister for Social Protection why he will cease funding the walk disability project in July 2016 which is currently supporting 170 young persons with disabilities who are in receipt of disability allowance and who do not qualify for employment activation supports or are deemed not job ready by employability services; to reconsider his position and advise on how these persons will remain supported when the project closes; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [9476/16]

Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein)
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472. To ask the Minister for Social Protection to continue the funding of the walk peer programme under the Disability Activation Project, given that otherwise the programme will close, resulting in a group of young persons who have taken the difficult steps into mainstream further education, training and employment options being without support from 1 August 2016 and as a result applying to the HSE for expensive day service places, and given that the cost to the Exchequer of continuing this initiative is €280,000 per year while the cost of ceasing it could be as high as €1.704 million per year. [9570/16]

Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats)
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498. To ask the Minister for Social Protection why he ceased funding to an organisation (details supplied) in County Louth; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [9375/16]

Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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I propose to take Questions Nos. 431, 467, 472 and 498 together.

The Providing Equal Employment Routes (PEER) project was one of 14 disability activation projects (DACT), in the Border, Midlands and West region, which were jointly funded by the European Social Fund (ESF) and the Department of Social Protection (DSP), from the end of 2012 to April 2015. The project was delivered by the Walkinstown Association for People with an Intellectual Disability (WALK).

The objective of the DACT programme was to explore a variety of routes towards ensuring that people with disabilities were enabled to avail of progression, education and development opportunities within the world of work. A key criterion applied when selecting projects was that the learning from this activity should be capable, where appropriate, of being mainstreamed in the future. Therefore, it is important to note that the projects were never intended to become ongoing service delivery organisations in their own right, no matter how successful the projects might have been.

It was on this basis that each of the DACT projects was awarded funding with a specified end date of 30 April 2015. However, in the closure phase of the programme, it was recognised by the Department that there would be a number of people still actively participating on some of the DACT projects, so a decision was made to provide funding to seven of the projects, which included the WALK PEER project, for a short period to the end of July 2015. This funding was provided so as to allow projects to ensure that their participants finished their involvement in an orderly manner.

I understand that the WALK PEER project was subsequently successful in obtaining additional funding from a private sector organisation and I believe that it is this source of support that will terminate in July.

Given the circumstances set out above, there is no provision in the Department's estimates to provide further funding to this project.