Mr. Ciarán Kissane:

I have a couple of points to make on the overall number of rejected applications. The fact was highlighted based on the review period examined by the Comptroller and Auditor General, which was up to the end of 2011. One of the issues that is also highlighted in the chapter 20 report is the fact that people were taking more than 12 months to sign contracts. One of the reasons for that is applications were not at a sufficient stage of development. We had identified that fact in 2010 so we took a much stronger line in terms of saying that we would only award funding to projects that were at a point where they were ready to go into production so they could meet the requirement to sign a contract within 12 months. That meant a large number of projects were failing at that point. We funded all the qualifying applications in 2011. That was one of the factors that fed into our surplus. Moving into 2012 we had identified that as being an issue we needed to examine so we changed the round structure and that meant last year we got a lot more qualifying applications. As Mr. O’Keeffe said, we will still have a significant number of applications that will fail but they will not fail because they do not meet the quality threshold. They are now beginning to fail because we do not have the money to fund them. In the current round-----