Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

My apologies for being late. The national economic dialogue is running at the same time as this committee and I would just like it put on the record that this is awkward. I was briefly there this morning but was not able to attend properly because of having this meeting here. Perhaps other Deputies cannot be here because they are there. I would just like to flag this as an issue to be looked at. I stated at the national economic dialogue that we need to reconsider how we engage with this process because they are interested in the budgetary oversight process, just as we obviously are too. I am sure that Mr. McDowell is familiar from his previous role with that whole world and how we get the partnership approach working properly.

It is very good to have Mr. McDowell's presentation and I have a few questions. With regard to flexibility in the fiscal rules, I vaguely recall that when the Juncker investment fund was set up there was a commitment that anyone investing into it could amend their fiscal rules. There was a caveat and it was difficult because there was no guarantee of being able to invest into a fund. Did that help the EIB's lending back out of it? I mention this as one interesting example.

I would also appreciate clarification on the figure of how much we have now managed to get out of Juncker fund, the EFSI. Of the €1 billion available to the EIB, Mr. McDowell must also have a rough projection of what sort of lending and what sort of take-up to expect this year. He said that the EIB had €1 billion available to lend but I imagine that that depends on the presence of private sector counter-parties to take it up. What is the projected take-up for this year?

Mr. McDowell also mentioned that the EFSI is about to be expanded up to about €500 billion. My understanding is that there are certain conditions with that. Am I right in saying that 40% of the lending has to go to low carbon energy or investments? I would be interested to know what the conditions are for additional lending. My understanding is that there are new conditions.

On the same theme, how does the EIB look at assessing different projects? Mr. McDowell mentioned, for example, that it was doing a lot of work on PPP motorways. I know that Tom Parlon was licking his lips at this yesterday and his members have done very well out of construction projects. IBEC was also out yesterday with a massive construction plan for the country involving motorways everywhere. It seems that this does very well for its members too. For the Irish public, however, how do we assess these projects? They sail through every Department of Finance cost-benefit analysis. There is to my mind an incredibly narrow set of criteria around time saved over a section of motorway and so forth and there seems to be no calculation of the environmental effects or the fact those time savings do not accrue in the end because of the M50 being so clogged. There does not seem to be any assessment of alternative investments such as public transport, for example. There are benefits from such alternatives. People could be working while sitting on the train, for example. Is Mr. McDowell satisfied with the cost-benefit economic analysis approach? I ask this particularly in light of what I said earlier on, where on the one hand the Commission is saying that it wants everything to be low carbon and on the other hand a huge amount of the lending from the EIB is for motorways and the like. That is what we build in this country. When we say infrastructure we mean motorways and we want as many of them as we can get. Is Mr. McDowell satisfied with the multi-criteria economic cost-benefit analysis we are doing on these projects? From the analysis carried out, either by the Department of Finance or whoever else is making the call, it seems we can only build motorways and cannot do anything else.