Departmental Funding
Dail Éireann — 2026-03-26
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Barry Ward (FG), Dún Laoghaire

I acknowledge what the Minister of State said about the amount of funding and supports there. The Minister of State and I know that Deputy Peter Roche, in particular, has done a huge amount of work in this area. He has worked particularly in the context of helping to support community organisations in his area. The difficulty he has identified, and other colleagues tell me they see it all over the country, is not a lack of funding, because there is a huge amount of funding there for the very communities the Minister of State mentioned, but a difficulty accessing it. Sometimes very bureaucratic and onerous processes have to be gone through. The idea behind this question is that there would be a community support officer in the local authority in the local area with the institutional knowledge and memory of how these forms need to be done, what systems need to be put in place and which boxes need to be ticked to ensure local community organisations get the most they can out of the SICAP funding the Minister of State mentioned and any of the other streams of funding available. The money is there. This is about ensuring that local organisations, which may not have a very strong organisational basis themselves, get every opportunity they can to access the funding and do good things in local communities.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-03-26/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:47+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-03-26