VOLUNTARY organisations and an independent expert have criticised the recommendation of the Department of Finance's National Lottery Review Group that lottery funds should continue to be allocated by the government rather than by an independent body.
However, they welcomed the Minister for Finance's announcement of a new £5 million annual fund to help private charitable lotteries which have suffered from competition with the National Lottery.
The report of the Review Group of the National Lottery, which was published yesterday, also recommends that in future all allocations, apart from a reserve fund, "should be devoted entirely to the support of community and voluntary activity".
Mr Brian Harvey, an independent consultant who completed a major study of the National Lottery two years ago, said that the new report seemed to accept most of the criticisms made of the lottery in recent years, "but proposed to do very little about them".
While welcoming the recommendation that all future lottery allocations should go to the community and voluntary sector, he said there had been "very inadequate discussion" of the merits of independent boards and maintained that it was "currently impossible for Dail deputies to get any information about where the National Lottery funds went".
Mr Harvey said that when he had asked health boards to name organisations in their areas which had received or been refused lottery funding they had told him the procedures were confidential. "This report does not provide any fresh information about who gets the money and the procedures for getting it."
A spokesperson for the Combat Poverty Agency, Ms Joan O'Flynn, said it believed the Government should take a certain percentage of lottery funds for State services. The remainder should go to the voluntary and community sector and be administered by an independent board.
The director of the Disability Federation of Ireland, Mr Roger Acton, said he was "very disappointed" with the recommendation against an independent board. His organisation's view was that there should be an independent distribution fund or mechanism to take allocations out of the political process, and all interests, voluntary and statutory, should be represented on it".
He was also concerned that some vital health and social services provided through voluntary agencies would be transferred from being "rightly funded by tax at ion" to being funded through the lottery at the discretion of government ministers.
Rehab's director of public affairs, Ms Angela Kerins, welcomed the new £5 million fund as "long overdue". She claimed that Rehab's sales had fallen from £12.5 million to £4.6 million.