Mr. John Gallagher:

On a very practical level the Department of public expenditure's rules guarantee 80% funding for Departments in the following year, so there is effectively multi-annual funding right throughout the public service. That does not apply outside. It causes practical problems in, say, the legality of the contracts that are offered to staff, so it gives rise to recruitment and retention issues in a big way. Obviously, it affects morale, and there are issues for someone looking for a mortgage when they only have a temporary contract. At EU level, there is an increasing level of requirement for multi-annual contracts. It is not something that could not be looked at. It might be useful for the committee, in the context of the Department of rural and community development side of its brief, to look at how the overall sector might be brought into that camp of having, say, three-year contracts or some sort of certainty.