Representatives of the national Meals on Wheels programme are across the way in Buswell's Hotel. They are looking for more funding. Some 2.8 million meals were provided in 2024. There were 228,000 users of the service.

When the service provides a meal and delivers it to someone, the cost of the meal is €7, and the service charges the person €7. The service does not have funding for the running cost of its vehicles. If anyone goes to any restaurant anywhere, even to get a sandwich, it costs a serious amount. We have people delivering a valuable service, meeting people in their own homes twice a week every week and giving them good nourishing meals, but they are underfunded. We need something to enable them to get extra funding, deliver more services and not do it at a loss.

The Meals on Wheels service is outstanding for a number of reasons in terms of the food and nutrition made available and the contact and engagement in the neighbourhood or community. The Minister of State, Mary Butler, has done exceptional work in substantially increasing the funding to Meals on Wheels. The funding allocation for the service has increased by close to 80% in the past three years. It is difficult to think of any other service where there has been an increase of that scale. Back in 2022, it was €3.5 million but it has gone up 80% since then.

The number of users has gone up.

The number of users and also the costs I accept have gone up, but 80% is a fairly significant increase. The programme for Government commits to further increased funding for the national Meals on Wheels network and to developing a plan to ensure that we support providers in every town in the country. Then, €10 million was made available in capital funding for community capital funding initiatives.