Mr. Hugo Sobral:

The Deputy is referring to Dublin, where there is the issue of the clean mobility that is necessary to ensure that pollution levels and CO2 emissions from personal transport come down. I hope the next level of cohesion policy can contribute to that.

On the initiative of the Irish Government, I certainly commend this shared island initiative and dialogue. The Irish authorities have been very constructive and very good partners in all of these discussions related to Brexit. We have a close interaction with them at different levels. I know Commissioner Šefovi addressed the joint committee recently. We are totally on the same page regarding the challenges we face in trying to make the best of a situation that we did not choose and a model of separation that we did not choose. We are not responsible for that but we are trying to make the best of what is a difficult situation and make sure that countries stick to their commitments and respect the agreements that have been signed.

The auditing of cohesion programmes is a complex and multilayered process. It involves, first, the national level, so there is a sort of devolution of competences to the national level to properly audit the national programmes. Then, there is the Commission level and the auditors in the Commission can also basically audit the national auditors’ work. Then, there is the European Court of Auditors that audits everyone else, and the European Parliament also looks at what we are doing. There are different layers of auditing.

In Ireland, a couple of years ago, we had some issues related to the management and auditing process that we hope can be improved. We will also be looking in this next period to ensure certain shortcomings that we identified in previous periods can be addressed. This comes most notably from what I mentioned earlier, that is, the need to empower the managing authorities to have more competences in certifying expenditure and in being closer to the investments which are done on the ground. A substantial part of it could be addressed if the managing authorities could have more competences and more power to manage the programmes.

Overall, we have a constructive relationship with Ireland on this one. I am sure this is a dimension that will be addressed in our next partnership agreement.