Michael Ring (Mayo, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I accept that. The Deputy has raised an issue with the programme itself previously. We made changes to the schemes. The other figures I want to give are on the amount of schemes that have been approved, the value of them and what is coming down the line. Up to the end of the year, we had 900 schemes approved, to the value of €26,292,771 and we have 285 now waiting to be approved, to the value of €16.165 million. The Deputy was involved in the Leader programme and knows that it takes a while for schemes to ramp up. When we make the allocations, if it is a community hall or another building, the money has to be spent before it can be drawn back down. I want to see the money spent. The Deputy asked a straight question and I will give a straight answer. He is correct that I will monitor this very closely. I will be monitoring earlier this year and I will not allow what happened last year to happen. I give the Deputy a commitment that I will monitor this into June and it certainly will not pass July, and then I will have to start making decisions with regard to going to the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform to see where I can reallocate some of that money.

Last year, I looked at capital funding, and the Deputy is correct about it. It is difficult to get schemes that can draw down the funding this year. Last year, I brought in the shows, and gave some funding to them, Tidy Towns and the libraries. I looked at ways in which the capital funding could be spent by the end of the year. With regard to Leader itself, I will give a simple example. I will not use the Deputy's constituency but another constituency, Kerry, which has 119 approvals. If one goes to other counties, there are numbers such as 23, 50, 20, and 15. The programmes are up and running. I would hope that we would see more allocations, more groups coming in and more of that funding being drawn down. As I say, we have the money and we want to spend the money. There is no doubt but that since January, one can see the spend profile is increasing month to month and we expected that to happen. On the Deputy's question, I will have to monitor that between now and June and July. I will be making proposals and have to talk to the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform about that.