Mr. David Owens:

As I said earlier, there is huge investor appetite. The NTMA was surprised that what it tried to raise from the green bond in January of this year was oversubscribed more than ten times. It ended up taking €400 million or €500 million extra. It wanted €3 billion, or that is what it was aiming for. In the end it raised €3.5 billion. There is an extraordinary investor appetite for this. The State is seen as a pretty trusted actor. As I said, we have annual allocation reports which are done by my colleagues on the financing the State side of the Department of Finance, with the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform and the NTMA bond desk people. The allocation report is published on the NTMA website every year, and it is extremely detailed. That is what the inventors want to see. In fact, it is also third-party verified by a company called Sustainalytics, which runs the rule over the investments to make sure they do what they say they are doing. For the State, this is a very useful form of funding, and for investment in green purposes, this is also extremely important.

As I said, we have the carbon budget increases, which this Government agreed would all go towards green projects. We have the green bond, and we have EU-tagged for it. Colleagues in the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform are going through the budget now and tagging it as being green or otherwise, including a soft taxonomy alignment. They are trying to do some assessment because, as I said, taxonomy is not fully complete, and also they may not always have the data to make calls on some of the measures. I think the overall voted expenditure is more than €90 billion. The green bond might spend €3 billion a year, so that is the bit we would stand up as being green and sustainable at the moment, out of the overall spend. Much of that spend is on pensions, social welfare, health spending and pay but with regard to the bits one can actually stack up on a current basis, they are working on that.