Valid questions have been raised, but I will deal first with the rural social scheme, in which 2,600 people are allowed to participate. The question arises of how there has been a saving of €1 million. At the beginning of the year the budget was to provide for 2,600 people on the scheme. The savings arose in the following way. Obviously, we wanted to keep within budget, as one cannot bust the Vote or carry on regardless. Therefore, we could not go over the figure allowed — 2,600. If we did, we might not find it easy to pull back if we were to overspend in some area. We did not have permission to go beyond that number of participants. In order to ensure we would fall within budget, in the early part of the year we did not allow people who had left the scheme to be replaced. We needed to follow this line or we would not have been able to stay within budget. Therefore, if somebody left in February or March, they were not allowed to be replaced until July. We had operated in this way previously to keep within the vote allocation. However, in July when we decided it was all right to fill all of the vacant places and told the Leader companies with vacancies to fill them, it took them longer than anticipated to do so. Despite all the lists, it took longer than we thought it would and as a consequence, we saved €113,541 or 0.2% of the total spend for the year.
The second aspect that led to a saving — this was hard to predict — was that when participants were out sick, we did not have to pay them because they were in receipt of disability benefit. Amazingly, that led to an underspend of €114,704. These two figures explain the total saving of €230,000. However, the big saving was created by the decision not to pay a Christmas bonus. This bonus was provided for in the initial Estimate and by not paying it, there was a saving of €778,934.
We now have the full complement of participants on the scheme. We started the year with 2,600 and will finish it with the same figure, but it took longer than we thought it would to fill some of the places provided. Once we told companies they could fill their places, we had to keep the money to cover the cost. We could not tell people to fill vacancies and then not have the money available. My problem is that if people delay in filling places, I must still hold the cash. I will never understand why there are delays in filling places on the rural social scheme because, as I understand it, there is a queue to participate in every scheme.
On the issue of what we are doing with the money, let me first explain that if we were dealing with big subheads such as that for third level education, we would not need a Supplementary Estimate for a sum of €1 million. It all depends on the size of the Vote involved. This Vote involves a small sum of approximately €944,000. Therefore, the percentage involved with the provision of a further €1 million is huge. We started in 2006, in which year €1 million was provided in the Vote but there was an underspend. In 2007 we provided €1 million but in a Supplementary Estimate a sum of €449,000 was taken away because, again, there had been an underspend. Last year we provided €992,000 and the outturn was €1.3 million. This year we provided €994,000 and the outturn is the €994,000 plus the Supplementary Estimate figure. This helps to meet the cost of Higher Education Authority payments of €1.2 million — the payments to third level institutions for the provision of approved third level courses. The Kings Inns receives €364,000 for the provision of intensive short courses for lawyer linguists which we need if we are to fulfil our obligations in the European Union. It also helps to meet the salary payments to three translators based in Brussels — €176,000 — and provides for the cost of two short-term intensive courses on the translation into Irish of legal documents such as statutory instruments — a constitutional obligation — of €198,000. Therefore, all of the money is used for courses, apart from the payments to the translators based in Brussels.
Deputy White asked what was meant by co-decision. When we received official status for the Irish language in the European Union, it was decided that only co-decisions — between the European Commission, the Council and the Parliament — would be translated. We now expect there will be more co-decisions than ever before under the Lisbon treaty. This will create a greater volume of documents to be translated.
