Alex White (Dublin South, Labour) | Oireachtas source

State aid notification is a two-stage process. There is pre-notification and formal notification. Currently we are in the pre-notification stage. We have external advisers testing the proposed strategy against the principles of state aid guidelines to ensure compliance. The first draft of this compliance report is due at the end of this month and, thereafter, ministerial approval will be required for a pre-notification submission. Once received, the pre-notification will be sent to the European Commission, which will assess the pre-notification and potentially seek clarification from us. To try to answer the Deputy's question as best I can, we are pressing the issue, and it is envisaged that the formal notification - the second stage of the proposed intervention - will be sent to the Commission in the fourth quarter of this year. I assure the Deputy that all the work we are doing now in the pre-notification stage will ensure that when we get into the formal notification, enormous amounts of contact will have taken place with the Commission and the directorate. We hope that most of the questions that the Commission would want to ask us would already have been addressed in the pre-notification stage. We are working very hard, carefully and diligently on the issue.

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