Ms Jacqui McCrum:

I will go on to the question on level of ambition 2. The original plan was to have a level of ambition 2 with an increase in the defence budget from €1.1 billion to €1.5 billion in 2022 prices by 2028. We are progressing on this. We have multiannual funding of €566 million, which is being allocated to us under the national development plan. This is out to 2025 and we will negotiate it again. In last year's budget we received an increase of €93 million in 2023. This was a doubling of the annual year on year percentage increase to 8.4%.

Tomorrow I will sit down with the Tánaiste and the Minister for Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform and I do not want to pre-empt what we may or may not get. The Government agreed that we would get to the figure I mentioned in 2028. We had agreed that we would not divide it on a year-on-year basis. We will go in aggressively tomorrow to look for what we require in our budget for next year.