Mr. Tony Murphy:

I will start with the second one first, the size of the cars. Regarding the regulation of the industry, the Commission sets the directives and the legal background. We are not involved in that. We are obviously involved in how that is implemented; that is the starting point. In a report on reducing CO₂ emissions, we specifically raised the issue of negation. This positive development had a negative impact because car sizes and speed, etc., were actually increasing. We have raised the issue. We go to the European Parliament and we hope that the transport committee in the European Parliament will pick it up and try to stop it in future.

I found it bizarre that on CO₂ emissions, the in-lab tests and the reality were completely different for many manufacturers. What is certified is not actually the reality. Conformity in this regard should be really tightly regulated and that will improve. We raise issues where we see them but ultimately, we just feed into the legislative and policymaking process. It is up to others to decide if they want to address a specific issue like that.

It is similar for the infrastructure. If it is at the level of local government here, that is probably totally funded from the national public purse. We have no mandate there; we do not even look at it. In many areas we are only scratching the surface. People have the idea that the EU budget is huge. It is about €200 billion a year, that is all. Maybe 40% of it goes to cohesion with maybe another 30% or 35% to agriculture. There is not much left after that for different policy areas like external aid, research and development or whatever it is.

We often have this request from the European Parliament, more so on the financial side in compliance audits, as to who is best in class and who is worst in class. They would like us to give a league table of member states. We say that we our auditing the EU budget; we are not auditing a member state per se. We are looking at how a member state is implementing, for instance, a regulation or a directive. We do not get into the level of detail for that. We have hearsay, obviously, that certain member states are doing certain things in a good way. There might be a reason for us selecting a member state in our sample so that if we think it is a good pupil we can highlight that in the report. That is the way we would take it on board.

For years, Ireland was always being voted as a good pupil by other EU member states because of its high absorption rate and things like that. It works a bit like that if a member state has a good reputation or is well known to be advanced in the particular area. It would be one of the criteria to take in when we sample our four or five member states. We would try to pick one that is fairly advanced or innovative so we can share the message around with the other 26.