Mr. Kevin Cardiff:

There was an audit of the Leader programme before the Irish reforms. Some Irish MEPs saw it as supporting the Leader programme structure that applied at the time, but as we have never looked at the structure since, we are not in a position to talk about the Irish experience of the Leader programme, in particular. What we did find at the time was that an important element of the success of the Leader programme was keeping important decision-making functions close to the people who were receiving the funds. That was not the case for every element, but for some elements local decision-making was better than highly centralised decision-making.