Mr. Larry O'Neill:

It will be difficult to address all of the comments made. I have made a list of sorts.

Deputy O'Dea referred to economies of scale. This economy of scale is an imaginary development that has happened in the United Kingdom where one of the impacts of the work programme has been the destroying of local community groups. That applies to both urban and rural areas.

Mr. Bowe and I have visited some of them over there and I have relations with groups in Liverpool and London. They have been put to the pin of their collar to stay open to the public. The work programme has sent people to these charitable organisations for training without contributing to the training, yet it claims the benefit when somebody gets into a job. I would not like to see that repeated here, but there is a sense that an element of that is happening in Ireland. We know the not-for-profit sector has served the State very well in providing services the State could not provide either at a local area or an economic level. These services range from mental health services to ordinary health services to lifelong learning to dealing with migrants. Somebody asked about disabilities. We run individual personal support, IPS, programmes for people with disabilities. There is an array of stuff out there on which we have worked and we will continue to work on it. That is where we should be.

Regarding procurement, there is some sort of illusion that the EU is directing that this must go to public procurement. That is not correct. Mention was made of the recent one, but SICAP is a model that was approved by the Attorney General, so this is not just something that was taken off the shelf and run with willy-nilly. It was approved by the Attorney General. We have given senior Department officials copies of the entire suite of procurement documents so they can understand exactly how SICAP operated for a not-for-profit organisation. We would like to see that happen. We welcome the Bill that has been introduced that brings into effect an EU directive. As the Chairman knows, I have been talking about this for a long time. Ireland is one of the few countries that has not adopted this directive. We are out of step because we are not actually looking after the social inclusion and the social services parts of the tendering process in Ireland. We go spectacularly for the buck only. My final comment would be that there is a history and level of skill among our staff. We work in a society. We do not work in an economy and we want to continue to work in a society that cares for the least well-off.