Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

I do not believe we were consulted by Indecon at that time. Around 2013 or maybe 2012, we produced a report on the use of the health and local authority fund which, from memory, was funded from about seven or eight different sources. There was a difficulty in getting visibility. There was a risk of multiple funding for the same objective which was obviously undesirable. There was also an accumulation of funds that were not used. These were the concerns we had at the time. One of our recommendations was on better information sharing between Departments so that if there is multiple funding that it would be identifiable. There was a circular, 13/2014, which required recipients of grant funding to identify in their financial statements the amount of funding they got by source so that when an individual Department is looking, at least historically, they will be able to see where funding came from for an organisation that they are proposing to fund. This means that if there are multiple streams, then at least they will be aware of it and know what questions to ask.