Mr. Denis Leamy:

I thank Deputy Michael Collins. I will respond to some of the issues and I might call on my colleague to respond to some of the others because he is more familiar with some of the questions the Deputy raised.

I will respond on the community services programme first because the Deputy raised a number of issues in terms of the audits and the burden that is placed on voluntary committees involved in that. On the context, there are more than 350 community service projects nationwide and the Department requires us to audit at least 5% of them on an annual basis. A set of rules has been set up for the community services programme by the Department against which we have to audit. Some issues that come across to the groups - I fully understand that from a local perspective, one would wonder why Pobal or the State is chasing an item of expenditure - are against the rules under which the programme was set up. They are against the rules to which the group signed up. We have raised this with the Department and have been working through it to try to change some of the rules to get rid of some of these anomalies over time. I also am aware that the Minister, Deputy Ring, is planning to review the programme towards the end of the year, which might allow for some of these pieces to be looked at. In terms of our role, our auditors go out to audit against the rules of the programme and we do not have the flexibility to move away from that.

The results of those audits come to our audit, finance and risk sub-committee and we discuss many of them in detail. It is fair to say the percentage of groups to which we go back to recoup moneys or against which there might be negative findings is very small. However, there might be findings that relate to governance, to how decisions were made or to how persons were accounting for the moneys. It is about trying to improve the practice of the groups when they receive the reports or where they get some supports from us as well around these broader issues, and we use these reports to inform some of that.

On the manager piece, while I will come back to the Deputy directly later, there should be no liability on a group locally in respect of someone coming to retirement age. As for people seeking redundancy, we take a firm view that the contract with the individual is between the local group and the individual. The support that exists, from a community services point of view, is a subsidy to the programme. Because they sign up to this concept of community supports, it is expected that local groups would have a level of matching funding or income they would raise from an enterprise they are running and that they themselves would then run the programme. On the redundancy piece, if someone was looking for redundancy or if an organisation had to make people redundant, it is an issue that must be worked through the local mechanisms from a governance point of view. All the groups must provide a three-year business plan and a big part of our testing and working through those business case studies pertains to sustainability. We do not always get it right but we do in the vast majority of cases, in trying to ensure they will be sustainable for those three years. In that sense, we would not foresee that there would be a need for redundancy. It is, however, the call of the local group in that regard.

Deputy Michael Collins raised issues in terms of the Leader programme. We are all familiar with the issues that relate to the Leader programme in terms of the slow take-up and throughput of projects. To clarify, our role in it was to assess initially the plans that were developed by each of the local action groups, LAGs. Second, it was to develop an ICT system to support the development of the Leader programme and third, we were required by the Department to carry out Article 48 checks at a central level on the Leader plans. The Article 48 checks are often the issue thrown up as being part of the delay and our turnaround time for any such checks that come before us is ten days. Moreover, we have kept to that over the past couple of years. However, I am aware that there are delays at a local level and nationally. There have been some changes made in the past number of months that have helped to speed up the process and we have noticed a good increase in the number of Article 48 checks coming to us to be done. In that regard, there will be a significant change over the next period but I accept there has been much difficulty and frustration in trying to roll this out on a local basis.

I might turn to my colleague on the point the Deputy raised on the fishermen and farmers with regard to the programme.