Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 15 October 2025
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure, Public Service Reform and Digitalisation, and Taoiseach
Scrutiny of EU Legislative Proposals
2:00 am
Ms Fiona Ralph:
I can cover this in the round and the Commission might want to comment specifically on the SAFE instrument. This is not the only borrowing instrument that is guaranteed by the headroom of the EU budget or guaranteed by provision. The Commission reports annually on the stress tests and other qualitative and quantitative testing it does of our contingent liabilities. It reports on it in a number of places. There is one report that should be due out in a few weeks which is called the Article 256 report on the contingent liabilities of the Union, in which it sets out the outcomes of stress testing. There is also the draft budget every year, the working document XI, which covers the borrowing that is provisioning. It sets out the risk involved and in each case to date, it has stated that the provisioning is adequate and the existing mechanisms are able to cover even the most the adverse scenarios. That is obviously backward looking. The latest report we have on those is for the financial years 2024 or 2023, depending on the report in question. I am not sure if the Commission might be able to add anything specifically with regard to SAFE but once the SAFE borrowing begins it will be carrying out all of this on an ongoing basis, including for the SAFE borrowing.
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