Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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I will try to respond to some of the questions raised. On the point made by Deputy Ó Cuív, while I accept that Fianna Fáil has in the past been supportive of the racing industry that has not been the case in more recent times. That is the reason it was important this Government stopped the rot. Between 2008 and 2011, this fund was reduced by €19 million. In its budget proposals this year, Fianna Fáil states very clearly that notwithstanding the significant contribution both boards make to the economy the scale of the subvention is unsustainable and therefore it proposes a €10 million reduction in 2013.

I accept that previous Governments have been greatly supportive of this sector but there is a tendency now perhaps for those in opposition to forget about the importance of the sector. It is a very difficult job for any opposition party to try to put an alternative budget together. I encourage the Deputy to make the case to his colleagues. Both big parties in this State have contributed to helping this industry to get where it is, and it is important to remind ourselves of that.

I agree with the Deputy; I would love to have an industry that was self-funding. The racing industry raises much of its money in that it spends much more than the €44 million it will get next year. In addition, owners in Ireland pay a much higher percentage of prize money than do owners in most other countries given that 30% of the prize money in this country is contributed by owners or those who enter horses. I would like to have a situation in which we have the capacity for multi-annual funding that Deputy Hayden asked for so that we need not have this discussion each year whereby we increase a fund in the abstract and get Oireachtas approval in order to fund the industry. We are putting together legislation at present to try to achieve this. If we had not had the kind of crisis we have had over the past five or six years there would not be the collapse in funding that has occurred. This is easier said than done, however. My Department is not the only one involved in this discussion. Neither is it true to say that betting levies were ever ring-fenced for the horse and greyhound fund, because that was never the case in the Department of Finance. It just so happened that betting revenue more or less equalled the horse and greyhound fund. The Department of Finance, in either this or the last Government's time, would never concede that betting revenues were ring-fenced for this fund. Instead they were matched off against each other in terms of income versus expenditure. This year some €28 million in betting revenue will come in. We believe we can raise somewhere between €10 million and €15 million - an increasing sum - in online revenue and for that reason I believe we can get the betting revenue over the €40 million mark, which is a major step in the direction of cancelling one out against the other in terms of expenditure and income. There are some people who would contest that, because not all betting revenue is from horse and greyhound racing, with a large amount going on the English Premiership and many other sporting events, from golf to the GAA and so on. It will be a difficult job to get the Department of Finance to agree to ring-fence anything, just as it will not ring-fence motor tax for road maintenance. It wants to have flexibility to determine how money is spent. I do not believe we will necessarily ring-fence money specifically for racing in the upcoming Betting (Amendment) Bill, but it certainly makes it much easier to set up some kind of multi-annual financing model for the racing industry if we significantly increase betting revenue.

It is also important to say that decisions were made in the past 15 years to reduce the betting tax from 20% to 10%, 5%, 2% and 1%. That was fine while Ireland was booming. As more people laid bets and as the tax came down there was more activity, and therefore there was enough buoyancy to ensure that even when taxation was reduced the amount of money coming in remained more or less the same. However, when economic collapse happens and taxation has been reduced from 20% to 1%, that buoyancy no longer applies. The actual revenue coming from betting dropped from more than €70 million to €28 million, which is the current situation. This Government will concentrate on getting the online tax working properly, at 1%, before it begins to talk about increasing that tax, which is a discussion for another day. First and foremost, we need legislation to be approved by the European Commission in terms of State aid rules. Then we can extend the betting tax online and introduce a licensing system for any bookie who takes online bets or operates a betting exchange. We will do that next year and I am as impatient as the Deputy to get it done. Unfortunately, however, I do not pull all the strings in this case. There is complexity in terms of getting Commission approval. We are asking the Department of Finance to take this step but it has many other priorities that are being pushed very hard, particularly in the build-up to the budget. We published this legislation last summer, however, and now we need to bring it before the Dáil as soon as possible in the new year so that we can get this new revenue stream into the Department of Finance. That will make it much easier for us to argue for a consistent multi-annual budget for the horse and greyhound industries, which is what everybody wants.

I thank speakers for their comments.