Of those 555, has the Department done repeat inspections?

Any school that was found to be non-compliant will be repeated and we will-----

Has the Department done any repeat inspections?

We would, absolutely, for any school that was found to not comply.

How many repeat inspections?

It is the number that were non-compliant. Ms Lyons might have the number there. I do not.

We see a lot of non-compliance here and nothing is done about it. There are no consequences afterwards. I just want to know. When the Department did its inspection-----.

There were 530 schools reviewed. Out of that, 55 had non-compliance issues, which Mr. McKeon has referred to.

For those ones that were non-compliant, was there a repeat inspection?

We absolutely keep those schools for-----

Was there a repeat inspection?

Not-----

So there was no repeat inspection.

Hold on a minute. That was for this year. There has not been as of yet a repeat inspection of those schools. They will remain on an auditing list to be repeated.

It is great to be on lists. Lists do not work for me.

In terms of the number of schools across the programme and the number of audits that can be completed, and also the level of compliance, just to say to the Deputy, the level of compliance between 2024 and 2025 has increased. There were fewer issues in relation to non-compliance.

One other thing to mention to the Deputy, and it is in the list that the committee got arising from the review we did and the actions we are going to take, we are going to look at robust compliance measures now additionally when we do it.

The C and AG's report last year would have given the Department actions or things to do. Were they complied with?

We only got the C and AG's report in September.

That was this year's.

In the report from the year before, the C and AG would have had a list on that.

He did not do a chapter on school meals.

There was no list. Is that correct?

No. The list I am referring to is the list arising from the nutrition review that was done this year-----

Okay. I will go on to the nutritional review, given that Ms Lyons is speaking of it. Mr. McKeon stated earlier that a meal costs approximately €3.20 of allocated funding. How much of that ends up on the child's plate?

All of it should end up on the child's plate.

All of it?

That is the cost of the meal, yes.

How come, then, the School Matters study stated that 36% of food costs purchase nutritious sustainable ingredients but that a high proportion, 52%, was spent on labour and staff? It is not all going on the plate.

The €3.20 is the amount of money that is paid to the food production company to put the food on the plate. I do not know the report the Deputy is talking about there. I am not familiar with the figures the Deputy is talking about, but €3.20 is what the food production company is paid to prepare the food, get it to the school and put it in front of the student. That is what happens.

According to the Department's review, just 7% of the meals analysed by the report were of basic nutritional standard. There was a requirement that you have two servings of fruit or vegetables on the plate, and only 14% of those meals achieved that. Approximately 50% of the meals contained no vegetables. Eight per cent of the meal orders were plain pasta, plain rice or mashed potato, with a further 7% of the orders being pasta with tomato sauce or tomato with cheese. Overall, 15% of the orders were for chicken goujons and sausage meals and Mr. McKeon is telling me that children are getting a nutritious meal for the €3.20. I would just like to know the thought process.

I will give the Deputy some answers on that.

This is a review that the Department itself has done.

If the Deputy could let me answer-----

Yes, okay.

It would be nice to get a chance to answer sometimes. The situation-----

No, I do not like smart.

The situation is that 80% of the meals are found to comply with the food standards. That is the situation. There are meals that did not comply with the food standards. The Deputy mentioned chicken-----

Full meals ended up in the bin.

No, sorry, they did not all end up in the bin.

A lot of them ended up in the bin, a fifth.

I would like to answer.

Deputy, let him finish because we are over time.

I would like to answer. You have to recall something I said on this to one of the other Deputies. The people who order the meals are the child's parents. We have allowed on the menus that foods which are plain pasta will be allowed and food which is pasta with sauce will be allowed. We were specifically asked to do that to cater for requirements of children who might have special needs in a school, children who might be autistic or who have picky food choices, who do not want vegetables or who do not want meat and just want plain pasta. That is why those options are on the menu. Parents then pick those-----

Does the supplier charge the Department a lower price for that?

Let me finish. Parents then pick the food. If a meal is delivered which is only plain pasta with a bit of sauce, that is the menu choice of the parent for the child. There is nothing wrong with that.

Does the supplier still get paid the same price, €3.20?

They get paid the standard price for all meals.

The supplier still gets paid the same price.

It is the same price whether the food has loads of meat in it or no meat in it, and whether it has loads of vegetables in it or none. It is a standard, set price.

It is a win-win situation for the suppliers.

It is an average price across all meal types. If we were to take those meal options out, I have no doubt the supplier would say, "The 15% of children who only want pasta are now gone. I have got to provide them with meat. The €3.20 will have to become €3.50." That is what would happen. Where you give parents the choice and you give an option which they have asked for because of special dietary requirements of their children, you are going to get 10% to 15% who will pick it.

Then the Department still gives the supplier €3.20 a meal-----

Because that is the average price across it.

-----for 3.5 million meals.

I do not believe there is anything wrong with that.

For 3.5 million meals, is that not correct?

No. It is 3 million hot school meals and a 500,000 of the others.

Okay, thank you.

I thank the Cathaoirleach and thank all the officials. Like others, I want to start on a positive note about the programme. It has been very successful since it was rolled out and it is providing significant support to families across the country, particularly given the cost-of-living crisis and significant moves in terms of anti-poverty, etc., giving every child the opportunity to have a meal. All of that is positive, but obviously we have to ensure we get value for money in what is spent on the programme.

Starting on the overall expenditure, there was a very significant jump from 2025 to 2026. What is the main reason for that jump?

That would be the expansion to all remaining primary schools.

It is essentially further take-up.

It is further take-up.

It is not additional cost in terms of the provision of the service.

No, it is extra students, extra schools.

I am sorry if Mr. McKeon clarified this earlier. What is the percentage take-up at this stage among schools?

Approximately 300 schools currently are not taking up the hot school meals for various reasons. In some cases, they cannot get a supplier. In some cases, they say they are not ready yet but they will be ready next year. In other cases, they say there is no demand for it in their school.

On that, 300 schools is quite a lot. Fair enough, they might have supplier issues, but is the Department interacting with those schools? The children in those schools are denied what is Government policy.

We do. We have looked and we have sought the reasons they would not be looking for the school meals. Obviously, we cannot compel them to do so but we engage with them and see what we can do to help them, for example if they say they cannot get a supplier.

Effectively, those schools are not adopting Government policy.

It is a choice. The Government policy is to make it available. It is up to the parents and the schools whether to take advantage of that option.

It is not directly the Secretary General's role, but how democratic is the decision in terms of parents having a say in it in those schools? For example, how does Mr. McKeon know that it is not decided by the school principal or the school?

It is the board of management of the school and you would expect that parents are represented on the board of management.

You would expect that, but I am concerned that maybe there is not a full democratic process there in those schools that are not taking up something that is Government policy. I will move on from that-----

I will give the Deputy a number. Of the 300 or so schools, approximately half of them say they will be joining the scheme. Of the balance of 150, 68 say the parents do not want it, 28 say no provider can be sourced and then there is a whole range of other smaller reasons.

What is the budget in 2027 for the hot school meals programme?

It is €268 million for next year.

That seems to be less than in 2026. Is it?

No, because we are carrying forward the €30 million-odd of surplus funding.

Okay.

We pay the schools on 100% take-up. Where there is less than 100% take-up, we use the funding from non-take-up, which is students not attending school, etc., and we use it to offset against next year's.

The surplus is what I was coming to next. I believe the C and AG has identified a figure of €34 million. Is the Secretary General saying the Department is clawing that back?

Every year.

Will the Secretary General explain how that works? The school tells the Department it has 200 students who are going to benefit from the school meals project but over the course of the year, that changes obviously. Is that how the Department claws back the figure?

That is it. If, for example, the average enrolment during the year was only 180, we would have funded them for 20 students who were not there.

Next year, the school will look for funding for 180 and we will provide it for 160, because we have already funded it for 20.

Okay, so it is a process that runs a year behind, if you like.

Yes.

The C and AG highlighted concerns about this. Are there plans-----

We are looking at that, as I said earlier on. We are doing a review at the moment as to whether we should drop the funding from 100% to perhaps 95% or 90%. This is a programme that has expanded very rapidly and our concern at the beginning was not to leave a school without money, because the average non-attendance rate is 10% or thereabouts. If you gave every school 90%, some schools would have non-attendance of 20% while others would have attendance of 100%. Therefore, the school with 100% attendance would be penalised. We needed to gather the data that, over a period of time, would allow us to pick a figure which is reasonable. We have done some work on it and it will probably be 95%.

It would be averaged out and every school would get that amount.

We think it should work successfully at about 95%. That is a decision we will take early next year.

Even if the Department were doing that in terms of the 95%, it would still seek to claw back any surplus?

Absolutely.

I would not envisage that it could ever be a nil figure. There has to be an element of that when you are forward funding. My concern would be that it should not be any more than it needs to be for operational purposes, in the interests of economy of use of Exchequer funds.

At present, it is 100% based on the information given by the school in terms of students. Mr. McKeon is saying the Department claws back the surplus, but going forward, it is going to reduce that 100% potentially to 95%.

The surplus should reduce, but as the comptroller says, it will not ever be zero.

Yes, I understand. So the initial outlay going forward will be 5% or 6% less, whatever is settled on.

That will be for the 2027-2028 school year.

On waste and uneaten meals, it has been reported that up to 18% or 19% of meals are not used. Would Mr. McKeon think that is an accurate figure?

That is based on the nutritionists' visits and detailed examination of 54 schools. I believe it is accurate. Internationally, the data shows that uneaten meals in school schemes in a lot of other countries that have had them for a lot longer than we have in terms of hot meals is between 20% and 40%, so we are at about close to the 20% level.

Explain that to me: meals uneaten, but are they paid for?

They are paid for, yes.

They are paid for, and they are not used.

In some schools they use them. The might give an extra meal to another student, that kind of thing, but they are meals that were paid for for students who were not-----

If the overall budget is €260 million and 20% is effectively not used, that is a waste of over €50 million.

We had that discussion earlier with Deputy Neville. I accept the term that it is food that is not used so therefore it is called "waste", but in all programmes like this, there will be an overhead. If you want to get to the students in schools who really need it, part of the cost of getting to them is to accept the overhead.

There is going to be a level of waste. I appreciate that. However, 20% seems very high. What plans are there to reduce it?

There are a couple of things. First of all, it appears high, but when we look internationally, it is at the lower level for school meals. It is at about the same level as restaurants report for waste in terms of uneaten meals paid for in their restaurants. It is at about the lower level of industry standards. The main reason meals go uneaten is because of absences from school, which is 10% or 11%. Leaving that aside, the next main reason is where children say they are not hungry on the day or they do not like the food on the day. We are currently doing a study with our dietician and UCD to understand those reasons.

Is there any way to make the model more flexible so that you are not paying for a percentage of those meals? At the moment, they are all paid for.

There are two things there. First of all, if we get a cancellation 48 hours before the food is delivered, we will not pay. If the food is delivered but there is a cancellation, that is on the supplier. If we were to apply it as a general rule to say that we will only pay for the food that is actually eaten, suppliers are going to build that overhead into their costs and therefore the price is going to go up.

Yes, but as we learned earlier, most of these suppliers are supplying multiple schools. If particular meals are not used, I presume they can reallocate them on a given day to another school.

In practical terms that would be very difficult because it will not be known until the food is delivered to a school. In some cases, the student is there. We are interested in the cases where the student is there but does not eat the meal anyway. We are investigating the reasons for that.

I want to move on to the line of questioning Deputy Bennett had in relation to the payments to schools. That was quite a revelation earlier in terms of sponsorship of jerseys, handouts to the school, kickbacks to the school and, indeed, to staff. Mr. McKeon mentioned a figure of €8,000 to schools. What was the highest figure paid to a staff member?

There were three staff members involved in that school. They were the caretaker, the school secretary and another person. They were administrative staff. The way it was presented to us is that they were staying behind after hours to help, because we have put the onus on the operators to deal with waste and the distribution and so on.

Are we talking about just one school here?

Just one school.

Just one school Mr. McKeon is aware of where they were paying-----

That is right. In that case, I think the figure was €1,000 per staff member to do the extra work. It was presented as a-----

That was effectively cash in hand, yes?

It was presented as, effectively, a salary payment. For example, if the Deputy were staying behind-----

I presume it was not taxed.

That is a matter for the school and the suppliers, but we have stopped that. We have told schools very clearly that school staff are not to be paid to do work for suppliers. The supplier will argue in that case that it was a pragmatic solution and that they needed somebody on site to deal with the food waste and so on.

Okay, so that is the payments to staff. What is the scale of payments to schools? How many schools are involved there in terms of various ways of giving-----

For example, there was €1,000 for a school prize for a school in Galway. There was €125 for a similar reason for a school in Donegal. A couple of hundred euro was paid for a Christmas hamper for a school in Raphoe.

So payments up to €1,000.

Yes, that appears to be it.

How much in total?

There is one school where we have questioned the payment and we have asked the suppliers to provide them. These are food pods where the food can be heated. The school was paid €8,500 to put it in and we said that should have actually been done by the supplier. Whether you would call that an incentive or just the wrong procurement model is a different thing.

Mr. McKeon is saying they have outlawed it now, effectively. If the Department found a breach of that now, what would be the sanction?

As I said earlier, our concern is that the food continues to get delivered to the school. We would look to the school to rectify that issue and give them an opportunity to do so. If they do not did so, we would withdraw their funding.

Okay. Ultimately, funding could be withdrawn. The programme for Government makes reference to the roll-out of this programme to secondary schools. What is the status of this at present?

That is something to be delivered by the end of the Government term. At this time we are focusing very heavily on the issues which have been discussed here today around waste, nutrition, delivery models and supplier concentration on the primary school meals scheme.

Does Mr. McKeon think it will be towards the end of term before that happens?

I think it is likely to be before the end of term.

Have you an estimate about what that would cost?

You would be looking at least doubling the cost. There are practical issues, and we have done some investigations. For example, in the junior cycle or senior cycle, a lot of secondary schools allow their students to leave their school campus during lunchtime and all that kind of thing. It is a more complicated scenario.

How many secondary schools have we?

My colleagues in the Department of education might answer that.

Over 700.

So far fewer than national schools.

But they tend to be much bigger, on average, because of the number of students.

I thank the witnesses for their engagement this morning. I want to start with a section of the C and AG report that reads, "The standardised hot school meal contract provides that the supplier is responsible for providing a healthy, nutritionally balanced, comprehensive menu, and that it is preferable that food items are prepared fresh from raw ingredients." Do we measure what percentage of the programme meets those criteria?

They should all be prepared fresh from raw ingredients, essentially. The distinction I think the Deputy might be getting to is, effectively, you can say there are five models, but really there are two models of food delivery. One is where it is prepared off site, fast-chilled, and then it is delivered to the school to be reheated, or it might be prepared off site in a close-by facility and then delivered hot to the school. That is one model: remote preparation. The other model is preparation on site, and there are a number of schools that do preparation on site. They have the canteen, the staff and the facilities to do preparation on site. That is a relatively small number. We have asked schools, as part of the procurement process this year, because it was a recommendation, to tell us what model they use. We have responses back from 1,898 so far. I can give the Deputy the numbers, if she is interested.

Yes.

Some 880 used a service that prepared the food off site and delivered it hot. For 770 the meal is prepared off site and reheated by the school in a school facility. The school would have ovens or so on in the building. With 131 the meals are prepared off site and reheated in an external pod the supplier has provided. There are 55 where the meals are fully prepared on site.

Okay. What is Mr. McKeon's preferred model?

I think everyone would agree the ideal model would be to get everything prepared on site. It is on site that-----

I am going to stop Mr. McKeon there. I am very glad he said that.

I know what the Deputy is going to say.

I want to pick up on that point and also repeat a line in Mr. McKeon's opening statement, when he said "Importantly ... [the devolved model] also provides flexibility to accommodate local circumstances ...". I need to raise with the Department a case from my constituency of schools which are side by side. They are St. Paul's Senior National School and St. John's Junior National School. The breakfast club in these schools has been in operation since the 1980s. It was the first breakfast club of its kind in the State. It feeds almost 1,000 children from both schools. All food is sourced locally and prepared freshly on site in a state-of-the-art canteen. The purpose-built canteen employs 32 workers from the community as part of a CE scheme run by Drogheda Youth Development. Despite the canteen and the breakfast club winning awards and being lauded in numerous reports it does not fit the new criteria for hot school meals model.

I have been raising this since March. I raised it in the House with An Taoiseach in March. He told me he would raise it with the Minister, Deputy Calleary. I raised it on 1 October with an Tánaiste, who told me he would raise it with the Minister. I have corresponded with both the Minister for education and the Minister for Social Protection and asked both Ministers to visit the school to see the state-of-the-art facility in operation, but unfortunately I have had no correspondence back from the Minister, Deputy Calleary. Bearing in mind that Mr. McKeon, as Secretary General of the Department, has told us his preferred model is a model like the one I have outlined, will he take this away and review this specific case to see if it can be incorporated into the new criteria? Is that being done already? Maybe it is happening behind the scenes at the behest of the Minister. Is the Department aware of this situation?

We are very aware of it. I assure the Deputy the Minister is not ignoring it and has not. The first-line responsibility in terms of the schools' procurement and the school facilities on site is with the Minister for education. The Minister has been talking to the Minister for education. I believe she visited the school and inspected the facilities.

No, but she is due to visit on 9 November, I think.

I think she may have been there already. I might be wrong.

There is a visit scheduled. The school received word yesterday. This is the Minister for education, not the Minister for Social Protection.

To assure the Deputy, the schools fit within the criteria to be funded so we will fund them. I gather the issue is particular to a question that the oven they have needs to be replaced. We are working with the Department of education and officials and will also visit the school to figure out a solution to that problem.

That will be music to many people's ears because-----

We cannot give any commitments-----

I understand that but-----

We will try out to figure it out and try to make it work.

I am sure an oven can be overcome if it is going to protect this service. These schools are in the heart of a community in Drogheda that has borne the brunt of organised crime feuds and their canteen and school meals facility is literally a lifeline to 1,000 children.

There is a lot of goodwill so we will try to make it happen, if it is possible.

I appreciate that. I am going to move on to some of the other questions.

Regarding the procurement, eTenders and all the administration that comes into this, am I right in saying from earlier communication that there is a schools procurement unit that provides support to schools on that? I mean so that it is not an additional burden on school principals because the Department is providing hand-in-hand support in that regard.

Ms Gaffey might answer that.

The schools have to do their own procurement but the schools procurement unit is there to support and help schools as they are doing that. There is also provision of the various templates they need for procurement.

Does the Department provide training?

Absolutely. We do webinars in advance of the timelines for submission of the funding application forms, etc., to ensure schools have their tendering done in advance of when they need to submit their forms to the Department.

Brilliant. Picking up on the additional burden that may be on schools, the officials spoke at length with Deputy Neville on the fifth of hot school meals that are not being eaten daily. How does the administrative burden that comes with that work for school principals or school leaders? Is that another task that is loaded onto principals? How is recording, registering and claiming back for uneaten meals managed?

I might ask colleagues to come in again. We have changed documents to push the burden of managing the waste back to the provider. The provider, when it is tendering, has to set out to the school how it will manage the waste and look after the costs of that. We have tried to take that burden off the schools and put it back with the provider. The provider has to include a waste management plan and I think 20% of the marks in the tender go to the waste management plan that will be provided.

It is a significant focus then.

Yes.

Okay. Moving to the concentration of the market and so on, it was touched on earlier that rat droppings were found in the kitchen of one particular site operated by the Lunch Bag. I believe they are not operating at the moment but last year we saw the Lunch Bag and Fresh pull out of supplying, leaving 80 to 100 schools affected with little warning. That forces schools to scramble very quickly to find alternative caterers and suppliers or provide cold lunches in the interim. Are these not stark examples of how centralising supply is a huge problem? Whether a supplier pulls out of a contract because it is not financially viable for it or it faces closure by the Food Safety Authority, a huge burden is left. Mr. McKeon has been very passionate about ensuring food is going to children who absolutely need it at all costs. That is the message I have got from him based on his earlier contributions. Behind all this the focus is on providing food for children who need it. However, if you have a market that is heavily reliant on these providers that can withdraw for whatever reason at any time, surely to God that is raising alarm bells that this centralised supply is not working.

I will say a couple of things. The Deputy is right about the passion. Barnados estimated 10%, as I said. If you look at our survey, 3% of the students said they would not have had a lunch only for the hot school meals.

That comes back to my example of St. Paul's and St. John's and how important this is. It is a lifeline.

That is 16,000 children, so if we want to get food to those 16,000 children, there are going to be compromises on certain things along the way just to get those 16,000 children fed. That is the first point.

The second point is we are concerned about concentration but I do not want to overstate it, if I can put it that way. We have 300 suppliers in the market so there is a good field of suppliers and other suppliers are ready to step up in the event that, as the Deputy said, two or three big ones start - I do not know if this is a parliamentary term - acting the maggot. Other suppliers did step up in the instance she referenced, in which of the 112 schools affected 100 were able to get alternative suppliers very quickly. I am comforted by the fact there is a large number of suppliers that can step up. We have to watch concentration. As I said before, if you look at standard industry measures of concentration that would be looked at by a competition regulator, the school meals market would actually be considered medium or moderately concentrated, not highly concentrated, because you will always end up with some big firms. It is important to say that, very often in Ireland, and members would have heard my colleagues in the Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment say this, a problem we have is we get a lot of small firms starting up but very few of them scale. This is a situation where firms that were small a couple of years ago have scaled and now we are looking at them and asking do we really want them.

As long as they deliver the quality and do not act - I will use unparliamentary language again - the maggot, I do not think that is necessarily a problem, as long as there is a reserve of a large number of suppliers ready to step up. I do not know if I have answered the question.

That is fair enough.

I would like to correct something. In relation to the supplier where there was an issue with rodent droppings, that was a hub for distribution. It was not a facility that was being used for the production of food. To be clear, it affected one school and that supplier found another hub to serve the school.

On suppliers, and this is the strength of the standard documentation that has been developed with the Department of education, there is now built in periods of notice. That was an issue previously when there was not, within a contract, a sufficient period of notice for withdrawal.

There is an ability to withdraw the services.

Now the contractor must give three months' notice under the new contract and, similarly, if a school wishes to withdraw, unless there is some very serious issue.

Unless there is a closure enforcement order.

The usual kind of things that would apply in contracts.

That helps.

That is a real benefit of the standard documentation as well.

I thank Ms Lyons for the clarification. I propose that we take a short break of 15 minutes.

I thank the witnesses for coming to our meeting. I am very conscious of the necessity to ensure that kids have the appropriate level of proper food. It is impossible to learn on an empty stomach. I am very conscious of the Barnados report, Cost of Living Crisis: The Impact on Children 2026, which stated that 30% of parents felt at some point they did not have enough food to feed their children, which is up from 28%, and 44% of parents skipped meals so their children could eat. That is on foot of the massive cost-of-living crisis and its impacts. I do not think anyone here is arguing against the necessity to ensure there are school meals but this committee is tasked to ensure there is value for money, and proper governance and oversight, in the expenditure of all public funding.

I want to return to the issue of the perceived kickbacks for some suppliers. To me, it is quite concerning given the huge volumes of money involved in the roll-out of this scheme. A payment of €8,500 to sponsor football jerseys, I think, was mentioned.

No, it was for a pod. Some of the food is heated in pods. In that case, as we understand it, rather than the supplier providing the pod they gave them money-----

That was a pod. You gave another example - sponsorship of football jerseys.

Football jerseys are at the €125 to €500 level, and they are generally at the request of the school when there is a supplier who is already in existence.

At the request of schools. We have been given the figures for the five largest providers. They are extraordinary sums of money, it has to be said. Were any of those involved in giving kickbacks or payments to schools? Did any of them make the top five?

There is a mixture. It is fair to say that there is a number of small suppliers and a number of large suppliers.

Of the top five, one providing for 656 schools received €57.7 million and it goes down to supplier E who received €14.2 million. Were any of those suppliers among the ones who engaged in giving these kickbacks to schools?

They are. I want to take up the term "kickback". In nearly every case, these were for things like prizes for school raffles and that at the request of the school. As the Chair and I know, schools do it-----

Of the ones that have been identified, how did they come to the attention of the Department?

Through our inspection regime. We do 500 inspections.

Of the ones cited, was there commonality with the suppliers? Was it all the one supplier? How many suppliers are we talking about?

No. There are very small suppliers and very big suppliers. It is across the range.

What about the pod that has been mentioned?

The pod would be one that I would call a medium-sized supplier. It was not one of the big ones.

Are they in the top five suppliers?

I do not believe they are, no.

For the sponsorship of jerseys, are they in that top five?

Some of them are and there is also some small suppliers. As the Chair will know, a lot of schools, and I was on a board of management-----

What was the value of that contract, for example for jerseys, to that school?

There are a few different ones for jerseys but they are generally from €60 up to €500 - that kind of range.

The value of the contract to supply meals to the school.

No. I do not have that information. We can get it. They are a mix of schools. As the Chair will know, and I have been approached myself when I was involved in a GAA club, GAA club schools do tend to approach suppliers and say, "We are running a competition. Will you sponsor a raffle?" They are nearly all in that context. They are approaching suppliers and asking, "Will you sponsor a raffle prize and put your brand on my jersey?"

Is that appropriate?

We have said it is not. We have said that we would prefer if it was not done. We have put that into the revised procurement that they are not to approach these suppliers to look for money.

Okay. How does the Department evaluate that?

Through the inspection regime.

When were the last inspections carried out?

They are ongoing all the time. We did 555 last year and we will do about the same again this year. They are continual.

Have any been identified this year?

I do not know that I have that report but Ms Lyons might be able to say.

We will not actually have that one. We are working a year behind, if that makes sense, in terms of looking at the whole school year. It will be next year before we have this year's.

Okay.

We have identified, and I ask Ms Lyons to please correct me if I am wrong, 55 cases of non-compliance-----

Yes.

-----of which most were not to do with this. I think there were only 16 cases relating to this type of thing. Sixteen out of-----

When the Department found out this was happening, did it go under the bonnet to see when these requests were made? Was it before a tender or a contract was awarded?

It appears to us that they were all made afterwards. There were approaches made to the supplier-----

Okay. Before anything.

-----the same way a school might apply a stationery supplier or whatever.

The one I do want to reference is the one about the staff members. I just want to be clear about that. In those cases, they were staff members who, effectively, were finished their working day and the supplier needed people locally to do distribution and waste management, and offered to pay.

Okay. Mr. McKeon said that.

They were junior staff members.

Yes, Mr. McKeon has said that.