Dr. Fergal Lynch:

An underspend such as the one in 2017 is always frustrating and annoying for the people involved. There were good reasons for it, though. The concentration of the underspend was in the early years sector, with €52.8 million of the total in that area. We have been building ECCE to a second year and we have introduced a new access and inclusion model, AIM. We tried to increase the uptake of some of the targeted schemes and, while we were unsuccessful at first, we were ultimately successful. The result was that, at the beginning of 2017, we made provision for what we believed would be the requirement for that year. In the event, ECCE funding was not required to the extent we had envisaged. This was because we were expanding the scheme and offered, for the first time, three payment points, in January, April and September. The September uptake was good but the April uptake was about half of what we had expected. When one is expanding a scheme, it is difficult to accurately predict the uptake and in may cases parents decided not to start their children in childcare schemes in April.