Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 13 October 2022
Public Accounts Committee
2021 Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 29 - Environment, Climate and Communications
2021 Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General - Chapter 9: Implementation of the National Broadband Plan
9:30 am
Mr. Ken Cleary:
I can give a bit of information and I am sure Mr. Griffin can provide more in ten minutes. Obviously, we in the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform have been involved with this project as well. It is not that we have lost out on anything here. The media piece that was referred to was correspondence the Department was seeking. There was no invitation to apply for funding on that. However, on 4 October, the Commission agreed that €20 billion worth of grants would be available for REPowerEU. Ireland’s allocation from that is expected to be around €89 million but that still needs to go to the Parliament and then to the Council, so the legislative proposal will not merge until next year and we will not have certainty on it until then. In the interim period, we will work with the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications to come up with funding proposals to meet that €89 million, and I would expect that biomethane will be part of that conversation.