Ms Caroline Bocquel:

I will respond to that. It is a fact that not a single person who has applied for grant aid, either under the BAR or EMFAF, who is eligible, has not received grant aid. Nobody has been denied grant aid through budgetary constraints. They have not been denied it for any reason, if they are eligible. They need to be eligible and we work with them to make sure that is the case. We work with clients all year round to try to prepare them for the grant process. These are significant grants. The current price of processing equipment means that to operate at the global level our processors either are operating at, or have the ambition to operate at, they are looking at a minimum of €500,000 for a piece of equipment. There is a significant amount of governance around that.

Our officers are out with clients helping them to prepare long in advance of when they want to apply for a grant so that when they do, it is relatively straightforward. We have just launched a new grant aid system. Our new programmes have been running on it for the past three months. It has been much simplified. It is much easier and can be done from a mobile phone. Our previous system was a little older and harder to engage with. That has certainly simplified the process. We took the opportunity, when moving to a new system, to simplify the systems as much as we possibly could. We have to balance ensuring a very simple and easy to use system with the rigorous governance required of us as a State agency.

We are working with clients throughout the country in all of the sectors, including fisheries, processing and aquaculture, to ensure that as many people as possible can avail of grant aid. That is borne out by the sort of appetite we are seeing. We are seeing unprecedented levels of applications for grant aid across every single programme we operate.