Ms Rose Power:

I will just add to what Ms Murtagh says. We have experience of the INTERREG programmes. To give a specific example, following the last call for INTERREG North-West Europe 50% of the applications that were selected were from Belgium and the Netherlands. They were the lead partners for providing the co-funding. That is a specific example of where those two countries alone took 50% of the lead partner positions and the funding under the scheme because of the co-funding that they have available to them.

The other area that probably needs to be addressed here as well relates in particular to civil society, social organisations and some of the smaller technological universities. There is a big issue here in that some of these ETC schemes do not provide advance payments. Therefore, people in those sectors with limited funding have a requirement to fund the cost of these programmes but they will not be reimbursed for a period of perhaps up to nine months. That is a huge cost that they have to incur before they receive any reimbursement under these EU funds. That prohibits a lot of the smaller technological universities and civil society organisations from participating in some of these programmes also.