Mr. Kieran Donoghue:

The environment has been a major feature of the way in which IDA Ireland has gone about executing its mandate for more than ten years. Two specific initiatives might be of interest to the Deputy. In 2009 we introduced an environmental aid programme which we marketed and promoted to our clients to encourage them to adopt renewable energies - combined heat and power, biomass, CHP energy efficiency and so forth. There has been a significant take-up of the scheme by our large energy users. It has allowed many of them to move to 100% renewables or significantly change the fuel mix in their energy use. The second initiative was we established new forms of FDI teams in 2015 and tasked them with going to the marketplace to identify potential investment opportunities aligned with a pro-environment, positive climate action agenda. We have won a number of investments in that area, for example, smart metering, new forms of energy and so forth. During the summer we also introduced our Go Green programme which we are actively promoting to our clients to raise environmental awareness within the portfolio. We are providing financial incentives for them to reduce their energy usage, become more efficient and move to a 100% renewables model.