Mr. Conor O'Kelly:

The fund is operating in a negative interest rate environment, as the Comptroller and Auditor General said earlier. While it is quite difficult to get our heads around it, even for those of us who are professionals in the market, this fund is investing in sovereign bonds for the most part and the lowest-risk securities. Its investment strategy is designed to protect the capital as much as possible in order that there is very little risk involved.

As I said in my statement, it is designed to produce a return of capital, not a return on capital. It is not investing for returns; it is investing to protect that capital. However, even in protecting capital in today's world, German Government bonds and even many Irish Government bonds trade at negative yield. We benefit from that when we are borrowing, of course, but when we are saving or investing, as we are in this fund, that is the other side of the same coin. In fact, when we designed and looked at the scenario analysis for this fund, when we first looked at the portfolio, we thought that the average yield on the fund, given the securities in which we were investing, would be minus 50 basis points. On a portfolio of €14 billion, that would be a loss of €70 million per annum, so it was designed at the outset to potentially lose that amount unless the interest rate environment changed, and it has not. That is the investment process.

I will ask Ms O'Halloran to talk about the timelines in terms of the Apple escrow, which is an important feature of determining our investment strategy. Of course, Deputy Devlin is correct to say that this fund is currently owned by Apple and Ireland together, but I will ask Ms O'Halloran to touch on the time span that we have ahead of us.