Terence Flanagan (Dublin North East, Independent)
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66. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills if he will provide a list of all NGOs in receipt of funding/grants from his Department in each of the past five years; and the NGOs, if any, in receipt of funding/grants from his Department over the past five years that are bound by a service level agreement. [6049/14]

Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)
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Recipients of grant funding and other payments from my Department are not mainly indexed by whether the recipients have Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) status. It is not, therefore, possible to provide a fully definitive listing of payments to NGOs over the past five years, without assigning very significant administrative resources to this task.

However, the table attached, produced following a summary examination of payments made from the Department's financial management system, does provide details of bodies regarded as NGOs, or as having status analogous to NGOs, that were paid directly from the financial management system in the last five years. The listing does not include other bodies that may have received Departmental funding indirectly, e.g. from a body that itself is in receipt of direct Voted funding.

While it is not possible in the time available to detail the specific nature of the funding and accounting arrangements in place between the bodies listed in the table and the Department, there would in general be a number of conditions attached to the receipt of Departmental funding. Such conditionality would generally take the form of requirements to comply with a range of criteria. These would include:

- Evidence of meeting scheme/programme eligibility requirements;

- Reporting of both projected and actual expenditure;

- Providing details of activity levels as well as qualitative assessments of activities or programme impacts;

- Various accounting terms and conditions, including required production of invoices received and paid and outlining services provided, retention of receipts, production of independently audited accounts.

If the Deputy wishes to obtain further information regarding any of the bodies listed in the attached table I will arrange for this information to be provided.