Mr. Mark Griffin:

No. I do not see any evidence of that. I think we relied to a very significant extent on the de facto arrangements that were in place for the management of INTERREG projects. The committee would have heard some of this at the Northern Ireland PAC hearings in March. For INTERREG III projects, a service level agreement was put in place in terms of the telecoms measure between the SEUPB, DETI and the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources in the Republic. That agreement set out what appeared to be joint responsibilities in relation to who did what. It is worth looking at the service level agreement. This is important in terms of the question the Deputy has posed. The service level agreement would have been provided to ourselves and DETI and would have been signed off by both Departments. The implementing agents would have been required to provide matching funding for the SEUPB. We did that. In that regard, we certainly discharged our role. Did we facilitate applications for funding? We did. That was also undertaken by DETI. Did we undertake project assessments? We were involved in the project assessment in 2004 with the DETI and Western Connect, the consultant appointed to the telecommunications measure, which looked at the Bytel project and ultimately put it forward for assessment. Did we issue offers of grants to projects? We did that by way of the letter of offer. There were a range of other things.

Custom and practice seems to have built up whereby a lead implementing agent was assigned for particular projects. All but one of the telecoms measures would have been led by DETI. We led on one of them. The day-to-day operational issues such as looking at payment authorisations, forwarding payment authorisations to the SEUPB, monitoring the project and post-project evaluations would have been undertaken by DETI and, in relation to the earlier part of the project, by Western Connect, the consultant established to assist in that process. It is instructive to look at the first two payment claims, for which approval was made by Western Connect and countersigned by DETI. When Western Connect's contract ended, the payment claims were authorised by DETI and countersigned by ourselves. It is worth noting, again, looking at the documentation that backed those up, that all the documentation was held in-house by either Western Connect or by DETI and did not go past our own Department. That is a practice that was built up. There was no formal partnership between the two Departments. If I was to add a fourth issue on which we should have done better, it would have been to formalise what was the de facto working arrangement between the two Departments.

I do not get any sense that the fact that this was EU funding was in any way a consideration in terms of how the project was managed, other than the fact that funding was available. Certainly, there was pressure in 2004 to identify appropriate projects that could be included for INTERREG III funding under the telecoms measure. Again, that is cited in the ASM report, and the pressure is particularly evident in the Northern Ireland authorities. We have one e-mail on file in the Department, to which the Comptroller and Auditor General referred in his report, which appeared to give the impression that the N+2 consideration - that funding is allocated at a particular point which one has two years to spend - may have been a consideration for us, but I do not see anything in the content or tone of that e-mail which would lead me to that conclusion.