Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

I can answer that question in the affirmative. Any Deputy, Senator or public representative has always got the same treatment from me. If Senator Finucane checks with his colleagues, he will find that to be a fact.

In operating a scheme I might decide, after consultation, to spend, for example, €4 million on adult education. In many of the mechanisms I am now operating, the courses which benefit from the money are not decided by me. Today, for example, I had meetings with Departments to draw up schemes under the RAPID programme. In all of those cases there tends to be a double lock system but the common lock in all of them is that the local area implementation team must agree to whatever is being done.

Some Senators may be aware that we recently did top ups of the capital sports grant in RAPID areas. That was a purely mechanical operation. We gave a 30% top up subject to two conditions. The first was that we would not give more money than applicants asked for and the second was that the amount did not go over 80%. The projects had to be in RAPID areas and be endorsed by the local area implementation team. I did not have any choice in the matter. Once the mathematical formula had been applied there was no point in anyone making a representation to me. The grant payments were decided by a mathematical system.

I accept the principle of what the Senator said. It is important that the grants are made according to criteria. However, I have a reservation about putting that into law. If the board was legally obliged to write the criteria it would have to have done a huge amount of detailed work in consultation with all the Departments to get the necessary information to draw up the criteria to operate the scheme. In many cases, such as the AIT schemes, we piggy-back on the State's evaluation mechanism, which is independent of Ministers. We use Departments for payments and for all sorts of reasons. We can do that if a scheme is part of the mainframe system, but not if the Accounting Officer accounts directly to the Dáil.

I will consider an amendment which would oblige the Minister to make the criteria for the assessment of applications publicly known. That would allow both the public and the board to measure what the scheme is doing against those criteria. Senators should remember that if Ministers did what we are alleged to do, the dormant accounts board would scarify us at the end of the year. It will be there as a watchdog.