Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats)
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184. To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, and Local Government if he will provide a schedule by local authority, heading and amount of the funding and grants returned and or unspent in part or in full to his Department in 2019, 2020, 2021 and to date in 2022. [58593/22]

Darragh O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Fianna Fail)
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The funding system that applies to local authorities in Ireland is a complex one, as those authorities derive their income from a variety of sources including commercial rates, charges for goods and services and funding from Central Government including my Department but also other government departments and state agencies. Most of the funding from Central Government to local authorities must be used for specified services. These can be grouped into 5 broad programme categories: housing, transport, recreational, education and environment.

My Department has a wide and diverse business agenda, covering a broad range of functions, including local authority housing, voluntary housing, homeless services, estate regeneration, energy efficiency retrofitting, housing grants, rural water schemes, urban renewal/regeneration, and fire services. In order to achieve its business objectives, my Department allocates significant resources to an extensive range of organisations, including local authorities, dedicated agencies, and other bodies; some allocations, depending on the programmes concerned, are made on a national or other non-county basis in the form of grant funding.

Grant funding is provided primarily on the basis of vouched expenditure, as opposed to specific up front annual allocations, once all necessary requirements as detailed in grant assistance schemes are met by the bodies/organisations concerned and that appropriate systems and procedures are in place to ensure the exercise of proper financial controls. Accordingly, the circumstances of funding being returned to the Exchequer do not arise.