Mr. Robert Watt:

We have moved to capital carry over on the capital side. In the past, there was an incentive to spend the money or it would be lost. So, on the capital side, we have moved to a carry-over system whereby we allow Departments to hold off on spending and that adds to their volume of money for the next year. That has created the right incentives. Under recent legislation to which I referred earlier, we now have provision for that to happen on the current spending side as well. That is something that we want to look at. We will look at envelopes over three years. If there is unspent money in year one, Departments should be allowed, without reference to the Dáil, to carry that over into the following year, thus creating the right incentives. However, given that we are still in this very difficult fiscal situation, we need to manage money very carefully every year and meet our budgetary targets so we have not activated that system. We would like to move to a situation where there is much more carry over between years so that we do not have the spending peaks to which the Deputy has referred. Our concern is that we do pre-payments and the Comptroller and Auditor General mentioned such a pre-payment in one of his reports on the UN money, which is not allowed. The current system leads to that type of practice, which we do not like. It can also lead to the spending of money in a way which is not appropriate because of the need to spend. We are trying to manage the peaks at year end but ultimately we need to get to the multi-annual approach to spending and funding. The system needs to become much more mature before we address the issue.