Naoise Ó Muirí
Question:412. Deputy Naoise Ó Muirí asked the Minister for Education and Youth the reason a funding allocation does not allow for underspends (details supplied); and if she will make a statement on the matter. [45563/26]
View answerTuesday, 16 June 2026
Questions (412)
Written answers
Under the UBU Your Place Your Space scheme, funded organisations (FOs) are provided with an annual funding allocation following the completion of the annual renewal of funding process, in order to respond to identified service requirements.
Where, for a variety of reasons, a funded organisation is not in a position to fully utilise its annual allocation, for example due to staffing or recruitment challenges, the funding does not lapse at organisational level. Instead, it remains available to the relevant Education and Training Board (ETB), which may submit proposals to the department to reallocate this funding towards additional programmes or initiatives designed to best meet the needs of young people within its functional area. Where no reallocation is proposed by the ETB, the unspent funding must be surrendered to the Exchequer at year-end, consistent with the annual nature of the Government’s Estimates process.
• All Exchequer-funded grants must be managed on an annual basis, with payments issued against vouched expenditure within the same year, and any unspent balances surrendered to the Exchequer at year-end.
• Grant funding cannot be pre-committed beyond a single annual Estimates cycle, meaning multi-year financial commitments are not permitted by default.
• These requirements ensure transparency, value for money, and compliance with the public spending code, but they also prevent departments from entering multi-annual funding agreements with youth organisations under the current framework.
However, to support funded organisations to have greater certainty of funding on a multi-annual basis, the UBU Your Place Your Space scheme, which is the largest youth funding scheme funded by the department with €54 million in funding for 2026, approval in principle is provided for funding for each three-year cycle of the scheme. A renewal of funding application is required on an annual basis to comply with the Governmental budgetary process to affirm the annual allocation provided to each funded organisation.