Mr. Brendan Gleeson:

I have seen this in the media. The fact is that most of it related to receipts that arrived in early or late. What we are looking at with the €200 million is the net figure. What happened was that we were expecting an €82 million receipt in respect of the rural development fund to arrive in 2017 and it arrived in 2018. Equally, our assessment was that because of changes in EU legislation we would not get some of the rural development funding for 2018 until 2019 and we actually got it in 2018. The bulk of it is made up of two very large receipts. It is not that we spent €200 million less than we had, it is that we got appropriations-in-aid to a significant amount of it. The actual spending figure was €40 million. We spent €40 million less than we had. The reason for this is that when we have rural development schemes we make prudent provision for what might mature during the year but they are demand led and if the demand does not arise the money cannot be spent.

When we set up the TAMS scheme, which was previously the agricultural investment scheme, we made what was not the best decision, which was that once people had an approval, they had three years to deliver on the investment. That meant it was difficult to predict when the approval would mature and when the money would be spent. Since then, we have changed that to one year so we are finding that we are spending much closer to budget on our capital investment schemes now.