2041. Deputy Paul McAuliffe asked the Minister for Rural and Community Development the estimated annual cost of restoring funding to the Social Inclusion and Community Activation Programme to its 2008 levels, in tabular form. [35064/24]

The Social Inclusion and Community Activation Programme (SICAP), is our country’s primary social inclusion programme, which aims to reduce poverty and promote social inclusion and equality by supporting disadvantaged communities and individuals. This is a national programme that is delivered in both rural and urban areas by Local Development Companies (LDCs) to help those in the greatest need.

The current iteration of SICAP began on 1 January 2024 and will run until the end of 2028. My Department has committed over €47m in core funding in 2024 for SICAP.

The funding for SICAP is subject to the annual budgetary Estimates process. I acknowledge that funding for social inclusion measures were reduced after 2008. However, since then, a wide variety of additional social inclusion measures have been initiated and funded, with some recent examples being the Empowering Communities Programme, the Community Development Programme and the newly announced Community Connection Project.

The work of SICAP is of huge importance to communities across Ireland in tackling the issues they face, linking in directly with the agreed objectives of the Local Economic and Community Plans. I believe SICAP to be a hugely important programme and was delighted to secure a 10% increase for SICAP for 2022, the largest increase since the programme was launched. In 2023 I secured a further increase of €1.3m and for 2024 a further increase of €3m. This represents a total increase of €8.3 million in the programme increasing the annual funding to €47.4m. Separate to this increase in funding, I also secured additional funding of €5m through SICAP to support Ukrainian Nationals displaced by war in 2022 and this increased to €10m in 2023 and 2024 and included supports to all New Arrivals and International Protection Applicants.

In 2008, the level of funding for SICAP was €84m. To return to this level of funding within the lifetime of the current iteration of SICAP, an increase of over €9m (€9,134,129.50) would be required each year from 2025 – 2028.