Since 1987 the Dublin region has received a disproportionately small allocation of national lottery funds. The four Dublin counties account of 30 per cent of the population of Ireland. Our records show that until last year less than 25 per cent of national lottery funding was allocated to sports clubs and youth clubs throughout the Dublin region. The irony is that some of the heaviest buying of national lottery products is in the deprived places of the greater Dublin area. Most of the national lottery sales each year come from the type of areas I will highlight tonight.
It is sad that some of my colleagues in this House seem to have only become aware of the levels of crime and vandalism when they visited estates in Dublin West during the current by-election campaign, yet many of my constituents are constantly intimidated and harassed and have to deal with major vandalism and crime on a nightly basis, much of it drug related. I congratulate the Government for its initial moves to deal with these problems. However, at the same time heroic youth clubs, football clubs, and GAA clubs are doing massive work for communities across Dublin, very often with little or no support from central Government.
Much of the spare time of the people who run these clubs is taken up in basic fund-raising to keep them going. Any strategy to deal with crime and vandalism must include targeting resources at the deprived communities and at youth and sporting facilities. I will bring one problem I have noticed to the Minister's attention since he has been responsible for this area for the last 15 months. In north Coolock, Kilbarrack, Baldoyle and Donaghmede we have large soccer and GAA clubs with memberships of perhaps 500 or 600 people catering for 12 to 25 teams of boys or girls but which do not have grounds or clubhouses and therefore do not qualify for ongoing national lottery funding.
To meet the massive weekly expenses of teams and club activists, members have to spend much of their energy, not on helping the young people and giving them something to do with their spare time, but in raising the money to run the clubs. Will the Minister and his colleague, Deputy Bhreathnach, look at this issue and see if we could do anything in 1996 towards helping often heroic clubs in my constituency and most of the other 11 constituencies of Dublin?
I realise there have been improvements in the allocation of lottery funding and I hope the days when funding was a personal slush fund for various Ministers are now gone. My colleagues on the Committee of Public Accounts are glad we played some small role in that. The recent lottery report also raised crucial questions in relation to lottery money allocated to ongoing spending and not to providing the extra facilities the promoters of the lottery intended.
Over the last nine years the most deprived areas of our cities and counties have been among the least well served by the national lottery. Despite the fact that during that period we had two Fianna Fáil leaders from Dublin, one of whom was Taoiseach for a long time, they certainly did not get the balance right with regard to giving Dublin its fair share. It could be argued as part of a coherent strategy to deal with crime and vandalism that Dublin should get perhaps even up to 40 per cent of the available national lottery funds, to make up for past neglect.
Will the Minister look at the allocation of funding for Dublin? To give Dublin its fair share should be a central part of our strategy to deal with crime and vandalism. I would like the Minister to examine the whole area of current spending for youth and sports clubs.
