Ms Mary Hayes:

I thank the Deputy. Regarding an update to what has happened in the trust, the Deputy will be aware of the €15 million exceptional funding that was awarded. What is happening with that rescue package right now is that there has been a large reduction of the debt level the organisation was carrying. That is managed very closely through the oversight group the Department, ourselves and the CCMA representative sit on. There is a massive amount of work to stabilise the organisation for the sake of the service users, really. It is less about the organisation and more about the service users in this case.

The €15 million was exceptional funding advanced by the State but it is repayable and that is one of the conditions of the oversight group. We are working, very much with the consent of the board of the Peter McVerry Trust, to be fair, on the transfer of unencumbered assets to recoup the value of that to the State over time. There has been complete co-operation with that. For us, the point would be to have a stabilised service, particularly in Dublin and the greater Dublin area. At the time we did explore all other alternatives and honestly I ruled them out and this was where we ended up. We considered whether there was capacity in Dublin to do all of the trust's work and we did not have it.

In terms of the deficit funding and competitive tendering model, there has been work done on that. The CCMA, the Department and DRHE have been involved in a review of section 10 funding. One of those recommendations, for example, is to disallow fundraising so that there will be no reliance any more on fundraising for the core parts of the service. That is not to say that an NGO cannot use fundraising money for added value but for the core parts we are tendering and saying are the absolute requirements of a service, fundraising cannot be used for towards that.