Mr. Martin Fraser:

First, I do not know what went on in the Department of Health as to what the Minister was or was not fully across because I was not involved. As I said earlier, if one is the Accounting Officer for €22 billion then I am quite sure one is involved in much bigger decisions than I am. I have a budget of between €35 million and €40 million with most of it being non-discretionary. I have a small amount of funding for research, which we allocate to the shared island initiative mainly. The Government will know about that and the Taoiseach knows about that as it is a very important issue from his point of view.

The overall research spending in the State is, I think, €950 million by Government. I cannot say that every single euro goes across the desk of a Minister. There should be proper processes for allocating the money and I am sure there is but it is €950 million so quite a substantial sum of money is spent every year on research.