Mr. Éanna Rowe:

The way we are funded is that 85% of our recurrent funding comes from this jurisdiction and 15% comes from the Northern Ireland jurisdiction.

That is for our day-to-day work. It is based on the proportion of waterway in each jurisdiction. When it comes to capital investment, the capital comes fully from our parent Department in either jurisdiction for the development in that jurisdiction. We are very fortunate that we have grown the capital envelope quite substantially over the last three years, which was voted through the Houses of the Oireachtas to our Minister and to ourselves. We now have a record €16.5 million of capital, which is currently being invested in two main ways. One way is through the asset management programme. This programme is based on inspection and priority rating. It deals with weir lock structures, lock houses, embankments and all of the other assets that maintain the navigations. The second, smaller tranche is used primarily in leveraging third party funding through the just transition fund, Fáilte Ireland, the rural regeneration and development fund and other outdoor recreational infrastructure schemes to allow us to develop new assets.

Our investment programme for the house boats will look at accelerated investment of 170 house boat moorings across a number of locations right across the canal network. Two of those are currently in design stage and we hope to have them in planning early next year. There is a long lead-in time to any development. It takes a number of years to go from concept design to environmental planning and then to execution. In many ways, execution is the shortest part of the entire cycle, but the process must be adhered to and it must be robust.

Places like Castleknock, Pike Bridge, Sallins and Hazelhatch were mentioned earlier. They require detailed design and environmental planning before we can go into planning. The capital associated with that is an ask we have to our parent Department as part of the budgetary cycle for that Department.