Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I welcome the fact that the Minister is moving in the direction of transparent criteria. That is progress and if he had said that in his first reply to the amendment, we would not have been here for the past 45 minutes discussing many other things. If the Minister had said he was prepared to consider an amendment to make his criteria transparent, I would not have a huge difficulty with the board, although it is the simplest way to achieve transparency. I will withdraw the amendment with a view to reintroducing it on Report Stage.

I cannot understand why, if the criteria for deciding disbursement are objective, he insists that the Government may still amend the submission on disbursement before it decides on it. If the criteria are objective, there is no need for the Government to have the right to amend the proposal because it will be done according to objective criteria. The Government can amend the criteria as part of its proposal but once the criteria are written there should be no reason for it to amend the final submission.