Mr. Pat Smyth:

The agency received gross non-capital funding of €602 million for 2014. It received an additional €6.8 million in capital funding. That is the funding position. In terms of identifying the areas where efficiencies needed to be made, the CEO has indicated that there were two main areas. One was the legal spending area where there was a spend of €34 million identified for 2013 and a budget of €17.5 million against that. Obviously efficiencies and reductions were required in that area to meet that target. The other area where significant efficiencies were required related to the reductions under the Haddington Road agreement. A total of €12.7 million efficiencies were required to be made in that year. As the CEO has pointed out, part of the achievement of that would have been from the reduction in staff of approximately 70 wholetime equivalents, WTEs, relating to the additional times under the Haddington Road agreement. The rest of it remained efficiencies that had to be met from other areas.

In addition to that, we would have projected in 2014 an expected increase of approximately €2 million in the payment of what we refer to as cash allowances, effectively payments for foster care and aftercare. In total, we identified €31 million in efficiencies that had to be made in 2014.