Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

The challenge for the Department was considerable. The comparison with the temporary Covid-19 wage subsidy scheme, TWSS, is interesting. As the Secretary General said, Revenue has a much better database, so it was in a much better position to address the challenge of getting the money to the businesses that needed it. Participation in TWSS was known to Revenue. I certainly support the Department's idea that there should be a review but there were practical difficulties once it came to do the review. It would have been difficult for the Department to assemble the data. I understand that the data about individual cases were lodged with individual local authorities. Even the sectoral analysis of which types of businesses were being supported, the scale of the businesses, and so on, would not have been in the Department's possession at the time.

I do not want to be overly harsh in my assessment of what the Department did. Neither do I want to suggest that many of the businesses were not entitled to the money. I think it is likely to be found that many of these businesses were entitled to it. The difficulty is that opportunistic people may have been able to tick some of the boxes and get money which was never really intended for them. We should look for lessons for situations where something like this has to be done in the future and identify where there is scope for sharing of information or the best place to locate a funding scheme of this type in an emergency. Does that address the Deputy's question?