Mr. Michael Ludlow:

I can address one or two of those questions as well as a question raised earlier by Senator Marie-Louise O'Donnell. I believe the development of the food sector in my neck of the woods is based on west Cork companies' success with the fuchsia brand. We made plenty of visits to see how the industry was advanced in west Cork. It is a model we imported. That was a massive success.

The question about funding relates back to the management of the last programme. When making an application for funding at the start of the programme, all of us would have indicated the graph of investment or expenditure for the programme over a five year period. As I understand it, the Department of Finance provided the responsible Department with annualised funding which did not match that graph by any manner or means. That led to some excitement and almost panic that the Leader programme was not being successful, therefore, mid-stream the idea arose that those companies that appeared to be investing more rapidly than others should have open access to the funds of all the others. That is what happened. It was a very serious mistake. It led to the Leader programme being guillotined on 30 August 2013, after which no grant was made available to anybody. The money was not there at that point. Equally, no grant was available from the Leader programme in the past three years to anybody in the country.

It was a failure of communication and a failure to take account of the knowledge that was passed on from the local development companies, in terms of the investment as it happens. I will explain that briefly. Normally, one will start off very quickly with a carryover from the previous programme. Then there will be something of a dip. As one goes through the first year one will see a rise, in the second year there will be a less gradual rise and in the third year the programme will zoom because of all the animation work and activity being generated. There was a failure at programme management level to recognise what happens in year three of the five year programme, panic set in and west Cork lost €2.4 million as a result.