Vol. 445 No. 9
131 Mrs. Owen asked the Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs the way in which expenditure in the international co-operation vote exceeded the estimated provision by £1.804 million; and if it is necessary for a supplementary estimate to be passed to allow for this discrepancy in the 1993 Foreign Affairs Estimates. [1486/94]
The amount provided in 1993 under Subhead C of the International Co-operation Vote (payment to Grant-in-Aid Fund for Bilateral and other Aid) was £15.3 million. To this was added a further £438,771 carried forward from the previous year, giving a total available in the Bilateral Aid Fund for the Year 1993 of £15.738 million.
Some of our bilateral aid expenditure arises at headquarters and some in the field. To facilitate field expenditure, moneys are transferred by way of imprests at regular intervals to our Development Co-operation Offices (DCOs) in priority aid countries abroad. The Department's concern is to ensure that there will always be a sufficiency of funds in these overseas accounts to maintain the continuity of our aid programmes in these countries.
In 1993, the total moneys issued from the Bilateral Aid Fund through a combination of expenditure at Headquarters and transfers to the Development Co-operation Offices was £17.542 million thus exceeding the total available in the Fund by £1.804 million. Of this latter amount, however, some £1.359 million was not expended in the normal sense but remained under the control of the Department at the end of the financial year in DCO and Bilateral Aid Project accounts abroad.
In order to regularise the accounting situation, a proposal to authorise an excess of £1.804 million in the International Co-operation Vote for 1993 will be put to the Dáil shortly.
