Mr. Frank Maughan:

The first part of the question relates to the amount of 737 million. This is an outcome of the key that has been set out in the legislative proposal for assessing the distribution of the revenues that will accrue to the EU budget from the social climate fund, and that amount is included as an annexe to the legislative proposal. It is broken down to 242 million in the three years 2025 to 2027 and a further 495 million in the years 2028 to 2032. The reason it is broken down in that way is that the Commission is proposing that the revenues will be allocated to the EU budget, and the budget runs on a seven-year cycle which ends in 2027. I understand that, from a legal point of view, the Commission needs to separate everything out into two separate sub-periods. That explains that.

As a share of the overall total available for the social climate fund, Ireland's allocation would approximately be just over 1% of the overall fund and that is broadly in line with Ireland's share of population. I will reiterate the elements of the allocation key: population at risk of poverty living in rural areas, emissions from fuel use in households, households at risk of poverty with arrears on their utility bills, gross national income, and the member state's share of reference emissions for the sectors concerned, that is, buildings and road transport sectors.

Thus the Commission does not specifically look at fuel poverty per sebut it does take data which is published data and which is available to it and to everybody else from EUROSTAT and other published sources. Data on utility bills, for example, will be available to the Commission for the Regulation of Utilities, CRU. This is based on the Commission's own examination of the data, not on data submitted by the Department. This is obviously one of the things we will drill further into as the examination of this proposal progresses.

As to Senator Boylan's question on why limit it to 25%, that is not something I can answer too specifically. It is what the proposal states. The expectation is that of the share of revenues from the extended ETS, 25% will go to the EU budget. Another portion will be allocated to an EU-managed innovation fund, which is an existing fund in place as part of the EU ETS competitive fund for the promotion of new technologies. The remainder will be allocated to member states' budgets as auctioning revenues. That is the broad breakdown of how the revenues will be allocated. The Commission has chosen 25% for its own reasons. It does not make a clear justification for that in the proposal but clearly the higher you go in terms of the percentage the more fluidity there is going to be about the revenues coming from the new ETS because as a market-based mechanism, the price of allowances in the scheme is likely to fluctuate, as is the case in the existing scheme. In principle it would be difficult to fix a total amount that could or would be made to the social climate fund at a higher percentage. I hope that answers the Senator's questions.