Ms Maria Graham:

Yes, and in the business plan, a steady domestic capped revenue of €475 million was set out. The secondary point was that if there were no charges, then the choice appears to be general taxation or ring fencing. Mr. McCarthy has teased out some of the issues with both those approaches. In other words, ring fencing means that some form of taxation is particularly earmarked for that water investment. It would give greater certainty to the utility but my colleague has set out some of the issues from a broader public finance perspective. It is simply saying that there seem to be different ways of approaching it and is asking, if one wants to fund the same money, from where does the money come.

As regards borrowing by Irish Water, to date, ministerial consent has been given for an amount of €810 million with various commercial banks. We understand that the weighted average margin on these facilities is of the order of 1.5%. Last year, NewERA did a report for the relevant Ministers looking at - in the context in which we now find ourselves - the most sensible way for borrowing by Irish Water to arise. Should it continue to be through commercial banks? The original plan would have been to start with short-term facilities, because they were working off-balance sheet and then to move to cheaper long-term facilities.

As my colleague said, in the short term, even under some element of water charging, the decision of EUROSTAT was on-balance-sheet and is unlikely to be reviewed in the near term. What is the best way, therefore, of funding that borrowing? NewERA has completed that report, which contains considerable commercial information. We are redacting that out with a view to having the report available to the committee by the end of the week. We will send that on. In teasing out the options, the question is: what is the cost of borrowing through a commercial lender and what would be the cost if the State took on that borrowing? The conclusion was that we would move to State funding.

By the end of the business plan, one is talking of debt in the order of €3 billion, in terms of where it is coming from. Ultimately, however, all of the Irish Water capital expenditure, CAPEX, and operational expenditure, OPEX, as well as the debt, is reflected in Government debt and on the Government balance sheet.