Mr. Robin Hanan:

I will answer some of the questions and refer the remainder to Mr. Ginnell, who has a better head for figures than I. The European Anti-Poverty Network comes out of the poverty programmes to which I referred earlier and was established across Europe as a network of organisations working against poverty on the ground. Many of these would be local community initiatives, some are housing organisations and others are national organisations, such as the Simon Community, Threshold, OPEN, the lone parents group, the Irish Traveller Movement and Pavee Point. This range of organisations originally wanted to raise issues of poverty at European level together. The Irish arm of the European Anti-Poverty Network was established to assist organisations in impacting on European policy.

Most of the European policies, etc., with which we deal - whether they are the social inclusion strategies or issues relating structural funds, employment and so on - are closely linked to national policies. We now work as much on national policies as we do on European ones. We are an umbrella body and, depending on the time of year and the number of people who have paid their subscriptions, we have in or around 250 member organisations. Most of the latter are local, community-based organisations that are working against poverty and some are the larger, national organisations with which members would be familiar.