LORD, make me good but not yet, might be the best way to sum up the new Government review of the National Lottery. A full 23 months after the Government promised to review the national lottery and following growing public concern, it has at last appointed a committee.
This committee follows a long and honourable line of public bodies - the Joint Oireachtas Committee on State-Sponsored Bodies and the Dail Committee on Public Accounts, to name two - which have already reviewed the National Lottery, but to little or no effect.
The National Lottery was introduced in 1986. Three commitments were given in the debate on the National Lottery Bill as it went through the Oireachtas:
. the lottery would be used only to fund new areas of desirable spending.
. voluntary and community organisations would be the beneficiaries.
. the lottery would operate in an open and transparent way.
These commitments were broken in months; 1987 saw the worst of the crisis in public spending and the government quickly diverted the incoming lottery money into a range of day-to-day spending.
It is instructive to look through the public estimates over 1988-89; many budget headings were simply zeroed, replaced by an asterisk indicating "now funded by the National Lottery". Doing this was a doubly attractive option, because the lottery brought in more money than anyone ever anticipated.
Instead of bringing in between £10 million and £40 million a year, as expected, by the mid-1990s the National Lottery was bringing in as much as £300 million a year.
Originally intended as a sports lottery, it was eventually used tub fund everything from hospitals to school books to library vans, from Army horses to schools for young offenders, from buying bogs to theoretical physics.
The funding of several bodies was transferred to the lottery, but they were not told at the time and did not find out till years later.
As for the other commitments given in 1987, they were quietly shelved. Only about 7 per cent of lottery money went to genuinely new projects, most of them in sport. But in the rush to get money out to a range of government departments, even sport received much less than it had expected and many dream projects of the 1980s, like the 50 metre swimming pool, were never built. Voluntary and community organisations only got about 37 per cent of the lottery.
They are not represented on the new review committee either.
As for transparency, the first questions began to be asked as early as 1988-89 about where the lottery money had gone. Allegations began to fly that ministers were using the lottery as a slush fund or to support pet projects in their constituencies. Years later, these allegations can be neither proved nor disproved.
There are two problems. First, many health boards, local authorities and VECs were given lottery money as part of their block grants from central government departments, but the lottery part of the grant was not identified or tracked. Several statutory bodies I contacted last year were unaware they were being funded by the lottery or by how much.
A second more serious problem is that several statutory bodies will not say where lottery funds have ended up, whether they go to voluntary organisations or their own statutory services, or the procedures and criteria they follow for allocation.
SEVERAL health boards do not advertise lottery grants publicly, and voluntary organisations must find about them by word of mouth. When I asked about the allocation of lottery money to voluntary organisations, two statutory bodies, the Mid-Western Health Board and the Health Promotion Unit, said the information was "confidential".
It is still not possible to find out who has benefited from the lottery-funded international activities budget of the Department of Education. Its lottery grants for cultural, scientific and educational organisations still do not have criteria or application forms, years after the Dail committee said they should. One could go on.
The setting up of this committee by the Minister for Finance raises many questions. Why did it take so long for it to be established? Why are voluntary organisations not represented on it? Will it be permitted to get the information denied to independent researchers?
Will it be able to find out where the money went? What can it do when it is told this type of information is "confidential"? Will it have the authority to recommend an independent board? Will it be able to take politics out of the lottery?
In the UK, there have been many, sometimes acrimonious, arguments about where its lottery money was spent and which voluntary organisations benefited, but at least they know where it went.