Mr. Killian Carroll:

I thank the Senator. The statement around the fragile nature of the balance sheet is basically that the net assets of the business are €73,000, so that speaks for itself. That is what the directors are referencing, in that they note the nature of the balance sheet and the fragile aspect to it. The thing about the funding is that the two largest funders are the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine and Sport Ireland. All of our money comes from that. The nature of the funding model for one of the funding partners is that it is a spend-and-recoup model. That is the nature of it and we work with that as best we can. It creates challenges for us but we also need to ensure we manage that in the best way we can, which we do. It is not a criticism of the model. It is what it is and we have to work with it. There are things we can do within our own organisation which I spoke about earlier such as managing our costs, our cashflows, ensuring that any non-economically commercial models we have are brought to a case where we at least break even. Obviously there is a vocational aspect of this organisation in terms of what we do for the industry. We need to have one mind. We are a not-for-profit organisation in that sense but also we need to make sure we at least wash our faces and do not fall into loss.