Mr. Noel Sheahan:

Returning briefly to the review and next round of the sports capital programme, the review is our own exercise to look back on elements of the programme that worked well or other issues we could improve upon. From the official point of view, we have finalised our work on it and have done a submission to our new Ministers. The reason we do that is that once it is signed off on finally, it will form the basis of the terms and conditions of the new round of the programme. The transfer of functions only happened earlier this week so we are now in our new Department. We are very hopeful we will get sign-off in the next week or two. We are currently testing our IT systems and so on in the new Department. As Deputies will be aware, the sports capital programme generates a huge volume of traffic to ourselves with several thousand applications each time and, therefore, we need to ensure all of our IT systems are in place before we actually open it. I am confident that we will be in a position to open it up some time in October.

We announced 32 grants under the LSSIF in January. It was always the intention that all of those projects would have to go through a due diligence process and we are fairly advanced on that. We are engaging with our legal advisers, which is the Chief State Solicitor's office, on finalising the actual grant agreements but again, it is more or less there. With the sports capital and the large scale programmes, we have always been flexible about the grants we announce and any delays or particular issues that may result in delays to the drawdown of funding.

At an early stage of this crisis, we engaged directly with the national governing bodies which appeared before the committee this morning to get updates on where they were in terms of some of the larger products under the LSSIF.

It is a rolling fund and we have amounts allocated for this year and next. If needs be, we will carry forward that funding. There is no issue currently in terms of funds being withdrawn and so on. As with any other large capital spend, we will conduct our own internal reviews - those will happen some time early next year - to see how projects are progressing, engage with the NGBs and local authorities, and determine whether we need to reprioritise.