Mr. Tony Murphy:

We have been auditing. It is a bit like what I was asked earlier. In terms of security, that is our chamber III. They basically audit budgetary support to third countries and obviously Palestine would be one of them. The Senator will have heard the furore in the Commission where the Commissioner said he would stop it and now he is saying there will be more strings attached or whatever. Again, they are political decisions that we do not get involved in. We have been consistently auditing that. The error rate the Senator referred to earlier is based on transactions across all the different policy areas including this area. Over the past five years, I think we have audited 15 transactions either in Palestine or directly linked to activities in Palestine. By default, because it is a big amount, it comes up in our sample. In our annual report, we highlight examples where we find things like the lemon trees as an example in our box.

We actually have an example from Palestine where nobody knows where the funding is. Money was transferred from a bank to some agency or whatever. We have a chapter on that and it is a box in there. It is approximately €700,000 or something like that. Nobody seems to know where the money actually is and that would be an error, for instance. That is another error in our calculation. Obviously, when we raise these, the Commission has to follow these up and see if it can resolve the issue or if not to try to get the money back. I do not necessarily think Palestine will become a much bigger issue unless there is a specific new scheme or something like that. Ukraine will definitely be a big thing for the next few years. The RRF will keep us occupied for the next few years because of the amount involved. It is supposed to be finished in 2026; we will see. Those are the two.

Energy and climate are issues constantly coming across our desk. I cannot see much changing in that. As Deputy Haughey mentioned, the biggest area will probably be the non-lethal aid or whatever. For the first time, an EU budget is being devoted to defence. We can see that we will have to invest some more time on that. That will probably become a bigger volume of work in future.