Ms Angela Kerins:

Can I make two points on that? Mr. McGuire may wish to come in on this. We have always considered this as a scheme to compensate charity lotteries. The point I was making is that it is not like a normal grant scheme that is advertised and to which organisations apply for grant aid. As Mr. McGuire said earlier, if the cap was scrapped on the charitable lotteries we would be in a much better position to increase our income, which would be our independent income, into the Rehab group. Instead of that, in 1996, following a lot of lobbying - not only by us, by the way; we are not the only charity lottery - the decision was taken and the agreement was reached between the charity lotteries and the Government that a charity lottery fund would be established to support that. The issue for us was that, for the first time, this audit was auditing that scheme as if it was a grant-in-aid scheme for specific purposes. The scheme was never for that.

We supplied to the Department of Finance and the Department of Justice and Equality a wide list of activities that we had engaged in. As I said earlier, they could choose what activities or areas of spending they felt were compatible with the fund, but we would have spent this funding. Therefore, it was not a grant scheme. It was not a scheme that the Government put up and said we could apply to for particular items. It was a far freer environment in relation to the organisation being able to apply it to certain areas.