Mr. Andrew McDowell:

The best way I can answer that question is to say that there is no upper limit on the amount which we are willing to finance in Ireland. Unlike EU budgetary funds and the Commission, there is no quota for EIB lending country by country. We finance projects wherever they come from as long as they are consistent with our eligibility criteria and they are bankable projects. As the Irish economy grows and the recovery continues, we would hope to see many more projects coming out of Ireland, but we are ultimately dependent on promoters making financing applications to us. We have indicated our ambition to do much more here. There are obviously two concrete steps that we have taken. We have opened the office here in Dublin and appointed Mr. Cormac Murphy as its head. At our own instigation, we have established this Ireland-EIB financing group to improve the flow of information between the Irish public sector and Government on capital projects. I hope that those two steps in particular will pay dividends in the coming years with regard to the volumes.

There is a big opportunity for Ireland in the dark clouds of Brexit when it comes to the issue of EIB financing. The EIB is inevitably going to do much less in the UK. Many of our teams - including our infrastructure teams - that would have spent much time in the UK are now essentially looking for other jurisdictions and markets in which to finance projects. The bottleneck within the EIB regarding how we can do business is rarely about money. We have much capital and funding. The bottleneck is often simply about available skilled human resources within the bank to appraise and assess projects. That bottleneck has opened up in that there is a window of opportunity as a large number of people in the EIB are now looking for a place to do more business. Ireland is very similar to the UK in some ways with regard to the legal situation, how the financial sector works in Ireland and how the Government authorities work in Ireland. There is an opportunity for us now to get much more EIB attention from our skilled lending officers back in Luxembourg.