Mr. Tony Murphy:

Yes. I would not have expected that there would be too much trouble finding a total of €1.1 billion of eligible projects, regardless of where they are or their merits. The point the Deputy makes on the European Public Prosecutor's Office is a good one in terms of common law, the UK and so on. As the Deputy said, 22 member states are part of it, which means a couple of other member states are also outside the confines of EPPO. I do not have a concrete answer on how it is going to work in the future because EPPO is still finding its way. It is in the very early operational stages and the same is true for OLAF. As some of the OLAF functions have transferred to EPPO, there is a little bit of reshaping going on there so the full playing field is not fully determined yet. I would imagine that there will be some pressure to integrate all member states into EPPO at some stage. I presume that would be the objective.

On the issue of errors, Brian Murphy and I both worked previously with the Comptroller and Auditor General's office and aware that it has the luxury of not having to do what we have to do at the Court of Auditors. We are required under treaty to give an opinion on the legality and regularity of the underlying expenditure, which is very unusual. No one else does that, apart perhaps from the Government Accountability Office, GAO, in the US which does something similar. It is a very unusual and specific thing which emanated from the Maastricht Treaty. I believe it was the UK that brought the concept to the table. We are where we are and we have to do it.

On cohesion funding, during the previous programme and period the Commission set up a task force to help member states to absorb the funds. The objective is full absorption. States are given their allocation at the start of the MFF period and the objective is to try to spend it because ultimately, if it is not used, it would revert to the EU budget. That is what would happen. Member states obviously do not want to lose that funding.

I cannot really comment any further on the Deputy's comment regarding the GNI.