Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

On the question of Government approval with or without amendment, I thought long and hard about this issue and I have a certain sympathy with the points expressed by the Senators. However, what I have found is that where one writes something in a very constricted manner, not only does it stop one doing things that would not be desirable, but at times it can stop one doing things that are very desirable. A valid question arises and this is the nub of the issue. How one legislates for this is what has been causing me the difficulty.

The Government decided two years ago to spend €30 million. The opening of the process meant that it was taking forever to spend the money and for the reason mentioned by Senator McHugh. The term "social and economic" is so open that the process was swamped with every kind of application all of which had to be considered.

Let us take the case of a decision to spend €20 million in the year 2004. As often happens the processing within the system was slower than we anticipated. We are coming towards the end of the year and we have a belief that we should still spend the €20 million. Let us take the example of a very tight situation, as happens in my Department, where certain schemes are evaluated and a score is given to each application, not by the Minister but by people distant from the Minister. If the top score is 100 and, for instance, the Department has allocated €3 million to this, that means that every application down to a score of 70 can be funded. We can allow that very good applications were given a score of 60 or 63. At the end of a year there may be €1 million left over. We can decide to reduce the threshold to 60 points to include these applications, in which case whatever schemes score 60 to 70 will be through the hoop.