I thank the Deputy for his question. My Department’s mission is to promote rural and community development and support vibrant, inclusive and sustainable communities throughout Ireland. The underlying basis for all funding delivered through my Department's community development programmes is to enable communities to identify and address their own needs in this context. In effect, the objective is to empower communities to represent themselves and get involved in addressing the challenges they face.
The social inclusion and community activation programme, SICAP, is the Government's foremost social inclusion initiative. It is a national programme overseen by my Department that aims to reduce poverty and promote social inclusion and equality by supporting disadvantaged communities and individuals. Delivered in both rural and urban areas by local development companies, LDCs, the supports provided are based on needs identified at a local level.
As the Deputy will know, the new iteration of SICAP covering the period 2024 to 2028 has commenced. A key policy initiative of the new programme is to strengthen the role of SICAP in regard to pre-development work with communities. In contrast to SICAP 2018 to 2023, there is now a dedicated core area of work called community animation, which focuses on building capacity in community representative structures, establishing new community groups and social enterprises, and empowering communities to lead out on identifying their own needs.
In addition to SICAP, my Department also supports two other programmes that engage with particularly disadvantaged communities, that is, the community development programme and the empowering communities programme. In particular, the latter aims to enhance community access to key services and empower local communities to craft their own response to area-based poverty and the resulting consequences with the support of their local community development committees, LCDCs. My Department has overall responsibility for both the LCDCs and the public participation networks, PPNs. These are important structures at a local level with a range of responsibilities, including supporting the engagement of community organisations in decision-making.