Mr. Conor O'Kelly:

The Ireland Strategic Investment Fund came out of the National Pensions Reserve Fund. It is a fund of €8.9 billion. It has what we call a dual or double bottom line mandate. It is charged with investing in Ireland only and its investments must produce a commercial return and a beneficial economic impact for the country. That is what we describe as a double bottom line. The fund has invested €3.8 billion across the economy since its inception at the beginning of 2015, across all sectors and regions.

Just under 50% is invested outside of Dublin. The returns so far on the fund have been reasonable. The annual return to date is 2.3%. The return last year, the year in question, was 4.3%. If we take the 2.3% annually, that has added €648 million to the size of the fund just because of the investment return. It has been a positive environment for the fund in that regard and it has been possible to add to the size of the fund through those returns.

One of the positive surprises for us in respect of the fund was the attraction of private capital. It was always envisaged that the ISIF would be a minority investor and would look to attract private capital to invest alongside it, or that it would invest alongside private capital. We thought originally that maybe for every €1 million the ISIF invested, it would attract €1 million from the private sector; that was the metric we were using in the initial studies. It has turned out that the multiple of investment and crowding in of private investment has been higher than that and is running at 1.7 times. This means the €3.8 billion of investment by the ISIF has resulted in €10.4 billion being invested in the Irish economy when we include the attraction of private capital. That is a very significant sum and a good bit higher than we originally envisaged.

The ISIF has a global portfolio. The €8.9 billion sits there and the bit that is not yet invested in the Irish economy is invested in the stock market and some conservative investments to wait for it to be drawn down, as it were, as the commitments come near. That portfolio sits in a variety of market vehicles that are reasonably conservative. It is managed actively by the team also.

In deference to Deputy Catherine Connolly, this time last year we had a discussion about responsible investing and I think it is fair to say that after that discussion we accelerated changes to our policy on responsible investing. Legislatively, we were only excluded from purchasing munitions stocks in the original legislation. We have expanded that policy to include the banning of tobacco stocks and have recently also included a list of the dirtier fossil fuel companies. Almost 16 stocks are now excluded from the portfolio. In accordance with what is really current best practice globally, we are still potentially investing in some older fuel companies provided they are making a transition to renewable and provided they have a proven decarbonisation strategy. They still attract investment from funds like ours. Those that are not are increasingly being excluded by the market and we have taken some steps to do that.