Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Senator Buttimer will be aware that this issue is a budgetary matter and, as such, can only be dealt with at budget time. It is important that this matter is raised, however, but I am not offering any golden solution to this issue on budget day. The scheme introduced just two years ago, however, was capped at just €5 million. For the Senator's information, a review of that scheme is being undertaken by the Department of Finance, the Revenue Commissioners and the charities sector and a report will be published in June or July. Therefore, it will be possible to discuss this issue well in advance of the budget in the autumn.

To give an indication of how things stand, requests for repayment submitted during the two years in which the scheme has been operating were in the region of €44 million to €46 million, but only €5 million was available under the scheme to meet those requests, which represented only about 12% to 14% of the VAT paid. It is good to put that information on the public record. We do not have information regarding last year's claims because people have until the end of June to submit them. I ask the Senator to watch out for the report on this scheme coming out this summer so that we can debate the matter well in advance of the forthcoming budget.