Olivia Mitchell (Dublin South, Fine Gael)
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Question 180: To ask the Minister for Finance the amount of surplus funds generated by the National Lottery in 2009 that was provided to the Exchequer; the proportion of this funding that was allocated to sports programmes or the development of sports facilities in 2009; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [9156/10]

Brian Lenihan Jnr (Dublin West, Fianna Fail)
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The surplus of the National Lottery is transferred to the Exchequer on a regular basis and is applied each year to part-fund the Exchequer allocations to a specified range of expenditure subheads across various Votes, including sports-related expenditure by the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism. Details of the amount transferred and the allocations to the relevant subheads are set out in Appendix 1 of the Revised Book of Estimates. In recent years, the amount allocated to these subheads is significantly larger than the amount available from the National Lottery surplus.

The outturn figures for 2009 are contained in the Revised Book of Estimates 2010, which was published by my Department last week. Appendix 1 of that document shows that, in 2009, an amount of €275m was transferred to the Exchequer from the surplus of the National Lottery and was used to part-fund total expenditure of just over €435m on the specified expenditure subheads. Thus, of the €275m transferred from the National Lottery surplus in 2009, about €70m was used to part-fund sports-related expenditure.