Ms Gillian Buckley:

From our perspective, we do bridging loans against the LEADER grants. We work very closely with LEADER companies and try to minimise the process for the grant applicant as much as possible. We have a very straightforward form - give your name, address and how much you are looking for. We rely on LEADER's evaluation of the project and that it has a grant letter of offer. We try to minimise the work for the applicant; we would like to press that point. They are volunteers who put in a huge amount of time and effort. We need to make it as easy as possible for them to access funding to allow development in their local communities. That is one thing we do and we work with the LEADER companies to try to streamline that as much as possible.

We also do term loans to the community groups. That is a bit more sophisticated than having to take on a grant because the organisation is now taking on a debt, which must be repaid. We need a business plan from the groups but it is appropriate to the scale of the project. If an organisation is doing new AstroTurf in the local community, it is likely to pay us back through fundraising efforts over the next five to ten years. We just need to have a track record of that. We try to keep the process as simple as possible but because it is State money, there are still hurdles. We need tax clearance certificates, state aid statements and insurance. We try to minimise the work but it is a challenge. There are many other supports. If a project is going ahead, it will have obtained a feasibility study grant to help it through that process. We try to streamline the process, and the more we can do that, the better it is for everybody.