Mr. Philip O'Donnell:

Could I come in on that? I have been discussing this quite a lot with one of our member companies in County Kerry, South Kerry Development Partnership, which has been very active in this area. I believe it is currently delivering three INTERREG projects. Two are in the energy space, those being, community energy and the ownership of energy assets, and one is on peatland restoration. These programmes would typically be funded to the tune of €500,000 to €750,000 overall. That is the magnitude. The programmes would involve international partners, so they would not necessarily all be funded through, for example, South Kerry Development Partnership.

This is an anomaly and something we are quite keen to stress. For a community and voluntary organisation to tap into INTERREG funding, its funding model effectively needs to be clean of other European funds because European funds are not allowed to be matched with other European funds. It is okay if an organisation has trading income or access to income from the public purse but if an organisation is largely reliant on other European funds, which is the case for many community and voluntary sector organisations now, it is locked out of INTERREG. The figures involved are not very large. The Southern Regional Assembly did research on this, which I have shared with the Senator, and it estimated that the contribution of an Irish organisation to an INTERREG project would typically be in the region of €20,000 to €30,000, or a third of the overall project budget.