Michael Creed (Cork North West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputies for their questions and I shall first respond to Deputy Cahill. We are not talking about savings in the Teagasc budget in terms of the Supplementary Estimate. The savings on the research side do not have anything to do with Teagasc. They are calls that the Department makes for funding it has available for various research projects. Once it makes an allocation or contract to the successful bidder for the funding the drawdown is then in the hands of the successful applicant, subject to certain terms and conditions. As I have identified here, the successful applicants have not triggered the drawdown yet but the allocations have been made. The funding has been made available under what is known as the Food Institutional Research Measure, FIRM, and the Research Stimulus Fund, RSF, allocations. They are not savings in the Teagasc budget.

On the issue of circumventing State aid rules, if it is an EU initiative as it would have been in other schemes then State aid rules do not apply. The Commission has made allocations previously. In terms of the SBCI fund we have invested €14 million of Exchequer funding and availed of the latitude available under the de minimisrules to include a sector that was not included in the July package when the Commission made €11 million available to the livestock sector.

I can quote Deputy McConalogue chapter and verse as proof that all of the farming organisations raised the issue of affordable finance. One of the farming organisations would have preferred if the €11 million was ring-fenced entirely for a specific subset of the livestock sector. We took the view that it was not-----