Dominic Hannigan (Meath East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank Ms Nolan. We will now deal with questions on the investment plan, following which Mr. O'Riordan will make his address. My first question is on the document itself, which refers to the fact that member states can help to augment the amount of money available by putting some of their own money in. The European Commission says that in the context of the assessment of public finances under the Stability and Growth Pact, it will take a favourable position towards capital contributions from member states to the fund. My reading of that is that such contributions would fall outside the 3% deficit criteria, so if Ireland decided to spend additional money on this fund, that would not be taken into account in our deficit calculations. Am I correct in my understanding? Has that provision done the tour of European capitals? Are all of our colleague member states on board with that? Having attended the COSAC conference at the weekend, it strikes me that there would not be unanimity across Europe on how we treat expenditure and whether contributions to this investment fund should adhere to Stability and Growth Pact rules.

My second question relates to the multiplier referred to by Ms Nolan. My understanding is that we are taking around €16 billion that has not been spent from the Europe 2020 funds and existing European budgets and adding €5 billion to that from the EIB to get a total of roughly €20 billion. We are going to look for a further €40 billion through securitisation or through senior debt and then use that €60 billion to leverage a further €240 billion for individual projects. As Ms Nolan said, this is essentially a multiplier of 1:15. She maintained that we are likely to get that effect with the fund, but I would worry about that because the types of projects being earmarked for support are riskier than those normally supported by the EIB. We met representatives of the EIB last year. While it is an extremely good organisation, it is very cautious in terms of its investments. While I would not doubt that the EIB could get the 1:15 multiplier, I wonder if we will actually see that. While I welcome this commitment, I believe the amount being put up initially is not huge and is existing money, in effect. I am not convinced we will see the quantum of investment envisaged as a result of that initial amount.

When it comes to setting out the list of projects, the document before us says that geography will not be taken into account. How can Ireland ensure that it gets a fair share of the cake, bearing in mind that infrastructure in some parts of Europe, particularly in the newer member states in the east, is a lot worse than ours? My concern is to ensure that we get some of the infrastructure investment in particular.

On page 14 of the document it is argued that the Commission has made "better regulation" one of the main priorities of this mandate. We all want better regulation but I ask Ms Nolan to give me some concrete examples of what this will entail and the type of changes we can expect to see.

I invite members to pose questions.