Mr. John Crawley:

As the situation is somewhat complicated, I ask the Deputy to bear with me. While the authority was an operating authority it accounted for the liability on its own balance sheet. That is not the norm in the public sector. Normally in the public sector, pensions are accounted for on a pay-as-you-go basis. The liability is still in the order of €8 million. On the wind-up of the authority, we started to close out issues of liability, among which were pensions and balance sheet adjustments, which I will refer to later. We asked the Department for guidance and it was agreed that pension scheme obligations would be taken over by the State. Ultimately the decision as to where that is to rest remains outstanding but because it was to be taken over by the State we were no longer going to account for it on our balance sheet and we thus wrote it back. The State is currently carrying a future pension liability of approximately €8 million, based on the valuation from 2013, which will have to be met at some point in time. Separately, it appears that the asset position of the authority will be in the order of several millions of euro, possibly as high as €9 million. As we are a State agency under the auspices of the Department, those proceeds go back to the Department, which will make the decisions on how they should be dealt with in the future. We are still working with the Department and Dublin City Council, which will take over many of the responsibilities of the authority, to decide exactly where those liabilities will be met and how the assets can be used to fund them. Approximately €1.1 million of the liability of €8 million will arise in the next five years and a further €1.2 million will arise over the following ten years. This is because the staff working in the authority were relatively young and, therefore, their deferral dates are quite far into the future.