Mr. Terence Connolly:

The Irish Regions European Office comes under the Eastern and Midland Regional Assembly. It is now active and headed by Ms Teresa Lennon. It is back up and doing quite well. There have been a good few visitor groups of councillors over to Brussels. It is doing excellent work at the moment. We hope that will continue into the future.

I work on the European just transition fund. That is 100% funded, 50% from the EU and 50% from the Government of Ireland. It is new and interesting to work on. Of that, €29 million is ring-fenced for local economic and community plans and for regional enterprise plans. We launched the first part of that scheme last Friday. This is a very interesting one to watch.

I will turn to the trust issue. Things such as state aid had to be considered when the details of that scheme were being developed. State aid is a complex beast of which people are afraid. There needs to be more support at the national level as to how to answer such questions. State aid is ultimately the responsibility of the State, but there needs to be more resourcing there to shore that up. At the moment, the complexity is being passed down to the beneficiaries at the bottom. This is because there is so much confusion or complexity involved.

On trust, there is an anti-fraud system that the EU is encouraging every managing authority to use called ARACHNE. It harvests information to create a sort of traffic light system for fraud. It is, however, unclear how that is going to work in an Irish context. In terms of complexity, and compared with other countries, we do not generally have very good centralised systems in Ireland when it comes to fraud and things like it. The link at the top as to who is in charge of fraud is not very clear. If those things at the top could be shored up, it would create foundations for trust further down the cascade of funding. Those are some of my thoughts in that regard.

On gaps, I agree with everything Ms Murtagh and Ms Power have said.

On simplified cost options, it is very early days. A concern I have in respect of simplified cost options is that it makes it easier on auditing and managing authorities but whether it makes it easier on beneficiaries, we do not know yet. Just because the audit trail is simplified does not mean the beneficiary does not have to keep all the paperwork and do the same diligence. There is a lot of exploration to do in that regard.