531. Deputy Ivana Bacik asked the Minister for Education and Youth the reason her Department provides retrospective funeral grant funding as part of the support package for survivors of residential institutional abuse, instead of replicating the pre-paid model used by Caranua. [45966/26]

As the Deputy will be aware, Caranua was established in 2013 to disburse funding supports to survivors of abuse in residential institutions from a ring-fenced fund of approximately €110m which was contributed by the relevant congregations following the publication of the Final Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse in 2009.

Eligible survivors could apply for funding supports in areas such as health, housing and education. Caranua revised its Guidelines in 2016 to expand the range of supports available to applicants to include, for example, household goods and funeral costs. These revised guidelines also introduced an overall cap of €15,000 in supports for each applicant, to ensure that the funding available benefitted as many applicants as possible.

Over 1,500 applicants chose to utilise the funding available to them by applying for their funeral costs to be pre-paid.

Caranua’s funding was essentially exhausted in early-2021 and it closed at that time.

With regard to the initiative which was approved by Government in January of this year, whereby Community Welfare Officers have been directed to give special consideration to the funeral costs of survivors, this is an entirely separate initiative which comes under the remit of the Department of Social Protection.