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

I welcome what the Minister of State said about there not being a wrong door. He is absolutely right. Applications should not be cancelled because of an administrative error or something like that. At the same time, we both recognise that this is public money, and there needs to be transparency and things need to be done right. That is important too.
Even in relation to what the Minister of State said about online applications, very often we are dealing with small community groups. There might be one person or a small committee involved in making the application, and it can sometimes be very onerous on them. The idea here is that there would be somebody in the local authority who knows exactly how the applications work, and who might be able to look at a group's application before it is submitted online or in paper format and advise the group where there might be a problem or where something might need to be changed, such as opening a bank account or whatever it might be. For example, many local authorities have officers who deal with European funding because of the same administrative and bureaucratic burdens on organisations in getting funding in this context. Is there a role for a community support officer to do the same thing in relation to national funding for community groups?

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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