Michael Collins (Cork South West, Independent)
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984. To ask the Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht if she will confirm the public funds originally allocated to each local action group, LAG, for the Leader 2007-2013 programme; the subsequent revisions to these amounts for each LAG in the period; the specific reasons for any such adjustments; the final spend achieved by each LAG, net of disallowances, penalties or ineligible expenditure; the respective disallowances, penalties or ineligible expenditure for the programme period, for each LAG; the details and the reasons for the penalties or disallowances that have occurred; the extent to which disallowances, penalties or ineligible expenditure have been recouped by her Department to date and the total amount that remains outstanding for each LAG; the other reasons a LAG may not have achieved full drawdown of the public funds available to it for the programme period; if penalties or disallowances have been levied on the programme by the EU Commission arising from its audits and inspections; and the reasons for, instances and LAGs that gave rise to same. [26167/16]

Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael)
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The original allocation for the LEADER elements of the Rural Development Programme 2007-2013 was approximately €400m. The initial allocation to each Local Action Group under this programme is provided in Table 1. The allocations were revised when the EU co-financing rate changed due to the financial crisis and this resulted in a decrease in the overall programme allocation. This revised allocation is provided in Table 2.

The final spend achieved by each Local Action Group up to the end of December 2015 is provided in Table 3.

An audit of LEADER expenditure by the European Commission in November 2013 resulted in the application of a 5% penalty under the Business Creation and Development Measure of the Programme. This penalty related to the verification process undertaken by Local Action Groups to verify the micro-enterprise status of beneficiaries under the Programme. The penalty equated to €1,232,904 for the 2012-2014 period.

The additional information requested by the Deputy is not readily available in the format requested and will be supplied separately, to the extent feasible.

Table 1: Original LEADER 2007 – 2013 LAG Allocations

Table 3 – Total Expenditure under LEADER 2007-2014 to the 31^stDec 2015