Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)

I emphasise again that my preference would be not to use the funds to have to pay any fines. My expectation is that if we are in a position where we have to pay fines, it would, unfortunately, become a budgetary decision and we would have to look at the money we have available across our country as a whole.

The Deputy asked what the money is being used for. The climate and nature fund has a clear enough narrative around it, which is that the money be available to invest in climate-related activity, reduce emissions and help with decarbonisation of our economy. The rubber is really about to hit the road on all of that in the next few weeks. One of the issues the Minister, Deputy Chambers, will be considering is an early allocation of that fund to help fund projects in different Departments that would assist in decarbonisation.

For me, the really important fund is the Future Ireland Fund. Basically, we will have a stock of money we will build up for use in the event our country ever again gets into terrible difficulty. Hoping we can avoid that, the real benefit of the fund is the Government agreement that the returns from the fund would be counted as Government revenue and used to deal with the costs of demography in the time ahead.

It is possible, by the late 2030s or early 2040s, that we could have nearly €100 billion in these funds, which would be a colossal amount of money for an economy of our size. The late 2030s is a long way away but even to be where we are at the moment, with €15 billion or €16 billion built up by the end of this year, gives me some comfort that if we were to get into difficulty, we have money available to use. I hope that does not happen. The real benefit of it is not so much having it there as an insurance policy. The real benefit is that if we have a fund built up of €40 billion or €50 billion and it is sensibly managed by the State, as it will be, the return it will give back to us per year will make such an impact in dealing with costs we know are coming our way. Those costs are not only because we will have more people living in Ireland, which is amazing, and more people living for longer, which is great, but because they will be older and there will be costs associated with that for which we are not currently well set up enough to be able to pay.