Budget 2027

6. Deputy Paul McAuliffe asked the Minister for Rural and Community Development and the Gaeltacht the way in which budget 2027 will support disadvantaged urban communities. [72673/26]

13. Deputy Paul McAuliffe asked the Minister for Rural and Community Development and the Gaeltacht his plans for the use of the increased SÍOL funding, as allocated under budget 2027. [72674/26]

I ask the Minister to outline the ways in which the Government is investing in disadvantaged communities. It appears the reply to Question No. 13 answers the question that I posed in Question No. 6. I ask the Minister to also outline the funding put in place for the SÍOL programme in the current budget.

I propose to take Questions Nos. 6 and 13 together. I thank Deputy McAuliffe for the question. I assure him that the Minister of State, Deputy Buttimer, and I had a particular focus on the community section of our Department for budget 2027. We secured funding of €628 million for the Department as a whole, €260 million of which will be available for community development. As the Deputy knows, we joined him in Ballymun on 8 July to launch the SÍOL programme in line with a programme for Government commitment to deliver funding for projects and initiatives in urban areas that have the highest concentration of disadvantage. The programme targets small areas of disadvantage in our towns and cities. It provides funding for infrastructure to improve the areas and the lives of the communities. Priority has been given to those small areas with the highest population of extreme disadvantage. The scheme is designed to provide supports to these areas similar to what is given to rural areas through schemes such as CLÁR. The scheme is focused initially on 15 areas that have been designated as SÍOL. The programme takes into consideration the areas in Ireland already covered by CLÁR to ensure geographical complementarity. The SÍOL programme will be reviewed again by my Department with a view to potentially adding areas but also learning the lessons of this first call for funding. We will be making announcements on successful 2026 SÍOL projects in the coming weeks. In addition to SÍOL, my Department has a number of other funding programmes that provide support to disadvantaged urban communities, including SICAP, the empowering communities programme and the community services programme. SICAP is supporting disadvantaged individuals and community groups in both urban and rural areas through locally tailored initiatives including community development, capacity building, education and employment supports. The Minister of State and I are delighted to provide just over €65 million in budget 2027 for SICAP. The key aim of this funding is to provide greater long-term funding stability for the SICAP program across the country and it should be noted that the final estimated allocations for each area will be confirmed in the Revised Estimates volume, which will be published in December. Both the Minister of State and I were particularly focused on ensuring provision for long-term funding to SICAP, which previously had temporary funding for new arrivals, and to make that funding a permanent part. This has been achieved and it represents an important step towards ensuring that community integration supports can be delivered on a more secure and sustainable basis. The funding in 2027, secured by me and the Minister of State, will ensure that communities in rural and urban areas continue to benefit from a suite of funding programmes. In addition to SÍOL and SICAP, we also administer new projects under the community centre investment fund. The community services programme will be expanded throughout 2027. The Minister of State and I were particularly anxious to secure a small fund to assist groups such as those the Deputy has brought to my attention with current account funding, particularly with the current cost-of-business and cost-of-living challenge.

The Minister has outlined a significant range of funding in place in his Department. Funding is only good if Ministers are willing to apply it in the right places. Both the Minister and the Minister of State have a strong feeling for tackling disadvantage. I know that from speaking to both of them and I pay credit to them. That is why I was so delighted to see the SÍOL programme come forward. Some of my colleagues in Dublin would have been envious of programmes that are in place elsewhere. Tackling disadvantage should be a systematic issue. We have the Pobal deprivation index. We know the electoral districts or the small areas that fall into disadvantage. There should be an automatic trigger, not just by the Minister's Department but by other Departments too, whereby if an area falls into disadvantage, certain supports are automatically put in place. That also matches the strategic goal in the child poverty initiative in this Department.

I agree about the systematic approach. This is what we have tried to do with SÍOL, to align it with the CLÁR programme in rural areas so that there is consistency to it. We will be making funding announcements. They are small, but Deputies McAuliffe and Ó Snodaigh will see the relevance and the support of SÍOL on the ground in their areas. This programme was set up quite quickly during 2026. We are going to stand back from it in the coming weeks ahead of 2027 and learn the lessons from it. It is not going the way I want it to go with some of the projects that have been submitted by local authorities. I am certainly happy to take suggestions from all sides of the House about it over the next few weeks. We will make changes to it for 2027 so that communities are more involved in the roll-out of it as opposed to, dare I say, pet projects from local authorities being stashed in under it. That is not what it is about. The decision on SICAP funding is really important. The Minister of State, Deputy Buttimer, and the Minister, Deputy Jack Chambers, launched the SICAP annual report recently. That was very helpful to the Department for securing the funding and most importantly the permanency of the funding for the new arrivals programme.

It was great to have both the Minister and Minister of State there when we launched the SICAP programme in Ballymun. When you have these funds, you sometimes have to allow communities make mistakes and allow them to be innovative. We will learn a lot from the first round. I ask the Minister to support the eight projects that have been submitted by Ballymun. They are not all local authority pet projects but ones that are from the ground. The Minister will see that himself. I also look at the DEIS and DEIS plus programmes we have had in the Department of education. Where is the DEIS plus programme in health? Where is the DEIS plus programme in all of the other areas? We should have a DEIS filter, SÍOL filter or whatever you want to call it on these great communities because when we have built local authority housing in the past, we have concentrated on people with low incomes and different challenges in their lives. That has resulted in areas of disadvantage and it did not happen by accident. A State response that is cross-Department and across a number of units, led by what the Minister is doing in his Department, will tackle long-term disadvantage in and of itself. What the Minister is doing is really important and it is about trying to have alignment with all of these programmes. The local community development committee, LCDC, was meant to do some of this as well, along with the community safety partnerships, because sometimes the other stakeholders are not at the table and the only ones that are is the Minister's Department.

I do not disagree with the Deputy. One of the biggest things that fries my head is the siloing in Government that means people get lost. It means communities get lost and people who need support get lost because it is always some other Department's problem. Having a DEIS or SÍOL filter is a good idea. In fairness to the Minister, Deputy Carroll MacNeill, and the Ministers of State, Deputy Murnane O'Connor, Deputy Butler and the team in the Department of Health generally, they do a very strong job on that. Across Government, we need a far greater focus on communities. It cannot be the role of the Minister of State, Deputy Buttimer, and I and our Department to support communities as it cannot be the role of the Department of Social Protection to do all of the heavy lifting on poverty. A better focus on building communities and the structures that communities need but most importantly building communities from the ground up and with people within the communities rather than people who think they know what the community wants makes for a better community. Community owned development is what we are interested in as opposed to community imposed development. Stronger structures give a better community. That is why we were lucky this week to announce the new strategy for volunteering and communities for the next five years. That will be crucial for building stronger communities that are owned from within the community.