Ms Deirdre McCarthy:

Going to public procurement was a bolt out of the blue for most organisations. It first came to our attention in February of last year. The material about alignment has been on and off the cards for over ten years and there have been different approaches to it. Some of them are about centralising and pulling smaller, community-based organisations into the bigger structures but the procurement issue was somewhat left-field - it certainly was for me. A lot of groups were shocked it had happened.

There have been a lot of changes going back from when the CDPs and the local development social inclusion programmes, LDSIPs, were merged. The two programmes were merged into the local community development programme, which is another example of the absence of consistency. They actually call SICAP the follow-on from the local community development programme, so why could it be grant-based and this one not be, when they are under the same legislative framework?