Mr. Ger Deering:

Yes. We have a strange situation where almost everybody is agreed that the conditions are too restrictive. What we ended up doing is enshrining those restrictive conditions in legislation. We often criticise what happened in the past but as far back as 1968 there was a better scheme and the next scheme came in during 1979. Those schemes were better. There were flaws in them but they were simple flaws. They were important flaws but it would have been easy to resolve them. One of them excluded people over a certain age so all they had to do to rectify that was include those people. Instead they withdrew the scheme. There is now a double inequity in that some people who are on those schemes rightly continue to benefit from them but they were closed to any new applicants.