I will answer the question of sponsors first. It will be like the community employment scheme. I am a great believer in rural Ireland and in what I call the parish scheme which, rather than a special scheme, gets all the bodies in a rural parish together. This could include the soccer club, the GAA club, community councils, the tidy towns committee, the day care committee, etc. This amalgam of the bodies — the parish scheme — then becomes the sponsor. I have seen this work well and successfully in my parish. When the parish gets its pool of people, they are divided out based on the needs of each organisation and according to their skills and talents. The sponsors must be local.
There must also be an intermediate tier responsible for recruitment and organisation. We are considering Leader for that. No decision has been made but we are discussing the matter with Leader because when we look at the review of structures, we see that although we have State-sponsored community groups, Leader is the only one covering all of rural Ireland, which is what we need.
Another issue we are considering is whether we should tell each sponsor and each local committee to set up a wages system or whether this should be done centrally because of the complications involved. We are examining a number of technical issues some of which are very mechanical. We will obtain quick answers to those.
On the dormant accounts, whatever the money is spent on, if it is not all capital spending, the fund will run out at some stage. That is the reason we have been prudent with regard to spending. Allowing that some money must still come from dormant life insurance policies, at the present rate of going there are ten years of life left in the fund. Dormant accounts funding should not all be capital spending because we would then wind up with many buildings and not many services. If the fund runs out, it will have to be substituted by something else. If people stopped buying lottery tickets, schemes funded by the lottery would have to funded by something else.
This scheme is here for the long term. At the rate of spending we are talking about, and we have been careful not to be tempted to spend it all in one go, the dormant accounts fund will have a fairly long shelf life, even if no new dormant accounts appear.