Mr. Niall Burgess:

Yes, the IFI draws on sources from a number of funds and we believe it would not have been a good outcome if the IFI had been solely funded by the Irish Government.

Effectively, it would have made it too closely associated with one donor and an arm of Irish Government funding activity, which I think would not have been good for the IFI or for the perceptions of its activities on the ground. From our point of view, therefore, critical to giving the IFI the role and the authority it needed was that it had a broader funding base.

In its very origins, the IFI received funding from the US, Australia, New Zealand and then subsequently from the European Union as well. We offered some modest support to help it scale up its activities and we have also been encouraging the British to give it support in order that it has a broader funding base and can operate in a way that is perceived as a wholly independent entity. The commitment to funding, by the way, is €20 million over the lifetime of its new strategy, which runs from this year to 2024. That is the context in which we are funding it this year.