Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 30 November 2023

Public Accounts Committee

Appropriation Accounts 2022
Vote 7 - Office of the Minister for Finance
Finance Accounts 2022
Report on the Accounts of the Public Services 2022
Chapter 1 – Exchequer Financial Outturn for 2022
Chapter 2 – Reporting Ireland’s EU Transactions
Chapter 24 – Performance of the Ireland Apple Escrow Fund
Chapter 25 – Irish Fiscal Advisory Council

9:30 am

Mr. John Hogan:

While my colleague is trying to find my note for me, I will talk a little bit about it. There were two payments. There was one for South Sudan which was handled in a particular way, which we then tried to replicate through the other mechanism. When the second transaction was undertaken, the ECB issued an opinion which found that particular transaction was counter to monetary financing rules so we had to reverse the nature of how we did it. We did that second one in good faith expecting that there would not be any difficulty in the way the first one was managed. It was just a situation where there was a change in perspective at ECB level which allowed us to treat it differently.