Paul Kehoe (Wexford, Fine Gael)
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Question 315: To ask the Minister for Finance the percentage of the money allocated to his Department from European funds for each of the years 2000 to 2006; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [5188/07]

Brian Cowen (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)
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Approximately 3.2 billion euro of Structural Funds was allocated to Ireland for the 2000-2006 programming period. In addition, over 600 million euro was allocated under the Cohesion Fund and Trans European Networks (TENS). An additional 2.2 billion euro was allocated under the EAGGF Guidance to co-finance the separate CAP Rural Development Programme 2000-2006.

My Department oversees the management of the Community Support Framework (CSF) 2000-2006 which contains Ireland's strategy for the use of the Structural, Cohesion and TENS Funds. The CAP Rural Development Programme is managed by the Department of Agriculture and Food.

The CSF is implemented through seven Operational Programmes which are managed by Government Departments and Agencies as set out in Table 1.

The annual financial allocations for the European Structural Funds, the Cohesion Fund and Trans European Networks (TENS) are set out in the CSF programming document (a copy of which is available on www.ndp.ie) and detailed in Table 2.

As you can see, a total of 3,782 million euro was allocated to Ireland under the CSF 2000-2006 comprising 3,172 million euro Structural Funds, 567 million euro Cohesion Funds and almost 43 million euro TENS.

As set out in Table 1, my Department is Managing Authority for the Technical Assistance Operational Programme 2000-2006 of the CSF and as such, has a total allocation of 4.9 million euro of EU Funds for Programme implementation. This represents 0.13% of EU funding allocated under the CSF 2000-2006.

The Technical Assistance Operational Programme has five measures which cover:

The administration costs of the NDP/CSF Monitoring Committee;

All ongoing evaluations including the mid term evaluation of the NDP/CSF;

Information and publicity;

The ERDF and Cohesion Fund Audit Unit, and

Administrative arrangements for the development of Public Private Partnerships.

Table 3 sets out the annual allocation of these EU funds to the Technical Assistance Operational Programme and the percentage of EU funding under the CSF 2000-2006.