Results 11,681-11,700 of 28,162 for speaker:Catherine Murphy

Public Accounts Committee: 2016 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Chapter 23: Accounts of the National Treasury Management Agency
National Treasury Management Agency: Financial Statements 2017 (12 Jul 2018)

Catherine Murphy: Retention payments totalling €80,000 were made to two NTMA employees in 2017. Are there any outstanding employment contracts which were entered into prior to 2014 and have retention implications?

Public Accounts Committee: 2016 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts (Resumed)
Chapter 23: Accounts of the National Treasury Management Agency (Resumed)
National Treasury Management Agency: Financial Statements 2017 (Resumed) (12 Jul 2018)

Catherine Murphy: I will come back to something I touched on this morning relating to contingent liability. There was a Supreme Court case in 2017. The court ruled, with regard to the 1%, that claims for future loss should be calculated at a real rate of return of 1.5%. This results in a higher net percentage value being placed on projected future cashflows. There has been an increase as a consequence of...

Public Accounts Committee: 2016 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts (Resumed)
Chapter 23: Accounts of the National Treasury Management Agency (Resumed)
National Treasury Management Agency: Financial Statements 2017 (Resumed) (12 Jul 2018)

Catherine Murphy: If somebody was made a ward of court and a payment went into a fund for investment, is this in addition to that or is it how amounts are projected into the future?

Public Accounts Committee: 2016 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts (Resumed)
Chapter 23: Accounts of the National Treasury Management Agency (Resumed)
National Treasury Management Agency: Financial Statements 2017 (Resumed) (12 Jul 2018)

Catherine Murphy: Is there a further catch-up or is that it, following which the projection involves new claims on the 2.7% estimated to be contingent?

Public Accounts Committee: 2016 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts (Resumed)
Chapter 23: Accounts of the National Treasury Management Agency (Resumed)
National Treasury Management Agency: Financial Statements 2017 (Resumed) (12 Jul 2018)

Catherine Murphy: Does it have an impact on the projected contingent liability? I presume that is why it has gone up.

Public Accounts Committee: 2016 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts (Resumed)
Chapter 23: Accounts of the National Treasury Management Agency (Resumed)
National Treasury Management Agency: Financial Statements 2017 (Resumed) (12 Jul 2018)

Catherine Murphy: I turn to a particular aspect of the investment in housing. A reason has been given, but we had been expecting €400 million of the proceeds of the sale of Bord Gáis to be placed in an off-balance sheet entity and applied to housing. However, that did not happen. We were told that it did not prove possible to devise a model which would be capable of utilising the €400...

Public Accounts Committee: 2016 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts (Resumed)
Chapter 23: Accounts of the National Treasury Management Agency (Resumed)
National Treasury Management Agency: Financial Statements 2017 (Resumed) (12 Jul 2018)

Catherine Murphy: The NTMA was not managing it.

Public Accounts Committee: 2016 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts (Resumed)
Chapter 23: Accounts of the National Treasury Management Agency (Resumed)
National Treasury Management Agency: Financial Statements 2017 (Resumed) (12 Jul 2018)

Catherine Murphy: Irish Water features in the loans. There is a loan of €450 million. Initially, it was €300 million and then €150 million. The only income Irish Water has apart from commercial water charges is from the Exchequer. Is it really a loan facility in that case? It does not appear that Irish Water has an income from which it can discharge loan repayments. It has been...

Public Accounts Committee: 2016 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts (Resumed)
Chapter 23: Accounts of the National Treasury Management Agency (Resumed)
National Treasury Management Agency: Financial Statements 2017 (Resumed) (12 Jul 2018)

Catherine Murphy: I presume it will be at a favourable rate.

Public Accounts Committee: 2016 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts (Resumed)
Chapter 23: Accounts of the National Treasury Management Agency (Resumed)
National Treasury Management Agency: Financial Statements 2017 (Resumed) (12 Jul 2018)

Catherine Murphy: Responsibility for an additional 17 section 38 organisations and others was taken over by the State Claims Agency. There was an 18% increase in settlements in 2017, resulting in a figure of €218 million. Was that exclusively because of the additional agencies or was the profile of claims different?

Public Accounts Committee: 2016 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts (Resumed)
Chapter 23: Accounts of the National Treasury Management Agency (Resumed)
National Treasury Management Agency: Financial Statements 2017 (Resumed) (12 Jul 2018)

Catherine Murphy: We know that there is a difference in the cost of settling cases when there is a clinical issue involved. How do we compare with other countries where the agency's counterparts settle claims in terms of the profile and extent of claims?

Public Accounts Committee: 2016 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts (Resumed)
Chapter 23: Accounts of the National Treasury Management Agency (Resumed)
National Treasury Management Agency: Financial Statements 2017 (Resumed) (12 Jul 2018)

Catherine Murphy: Does the agency have a way to measure clinical cases?

Public Accounts Committee: 2016 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts (Resumed)
Chapter 23: Accounts of the National Treasury Management Agency (Resumed)
National Treasury Management Agency: Financial Statements 2017 (Resumed) (12 Jul 2018)

Catherine Murphy: I am not talking about individual cases but numbers. I am trying to get to a question I asked Mr. Breen earlier about looking at causes and which he answered.

Public Accounts Committee: 2016 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts (Resumed)
Chapter 23: Accounts of the National Treasury Management Agency (Resumed)
National Treasury Management Agency: Financial Statements 2017 (Resumed) (12 Jul 2018)

Catherine Murphy: I wish to follow on from what Deputy Catherine Connolly asked this morning about the investment in housing within the private sector. There is ethical investment in other areas. Would the NTMA fund the construction of developments wholly run by REITS? They may well be foreign investors that are subject only to withholding tax. Does the NTMA look at for whom buildings are likely to be built?

Public Accounts Committee: 2016 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts (Resumed)
Chapter 23: Accounts of the National Treasury Management Agency (Resumed)
National Treasury Management Agency: Financial Statements 2017 (Resumed) (12 Jul 2018)

Catherine Murphy: That is what I am worried about. Not only are they able to achieve very high rents, they also pay very little tax. To understate it, it would be very undesirable to invest public funds to build where such an advantage would accrue to the investors.

Public Accounts Committee: 2016 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts (Resumed)
Chapter 23: Accounts of the National Treasury Management Agency (Resumed)
National Treasury Management Agency: Financial Statements 2017 (Resumed) (12 Jul 2018)

Catherine Murphy: The pensions reserve fund stands at €8.9 billion.

Public Accounts Committee: 2016 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts (Resumed)
Chapter 23: Accounts of the National Treasury Management Agency (Resumed)
National Treasury Management Agency: Financial Statements 2017 (Resumed) (12 Jul 2018)

Catherine Murphy: The one which was not called the pensions reserve fund. We used most of it, around €19 billion to bail out the banks at the time, or it was not quite a bailout. That was initiated a long time back and was building up. There is a real pensions time bomb. The fund is now a portion of what it was almost eight or ten years ago. Has the NTMA done projections about what the requirements...

Public Accounts Committee: 2016 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts (Resumed)
Chapter 23: Accounts of the National Treasury Management Agency (Resumed)
National Treasury Management Agency: Financial Statements 2017 (Resumed) (12 Jul 2018)

Catherine Murphy: Considering that there was €5 billion to invest and it is now €8.9 billion, that is potentially a sizeable difference if things had remained as they were and there was no further money invested into it. When we talk about the pensions time bomb and the adequacy of the provisions, is that something the NTMA projects or is it done at departmental level?

Public Accounts Committee: 2016 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts (Resumed)
Chapter 23: Accounts of the National Treasury Management Agency (Resumed)
National Treasury Management Agency: Financial Statements 2017 (Resumed) (12 Jul 2018)

Catherine Murphy: Is this money there to be used for that sole purpose?

Public Accounts Committee: 2016 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts (Resumed)
Chapter 23: Accounts of the National Treasury Management Agency (Resumed)
National Treasury Management Agency: Financial Statements 2017 (Resumed) (12 Jul 2018)

Catherine Murphy: Right. On the pensions time bomb and the ageing population, while I wish we could hold the time back, when are we getting into serious trouble in terms of funding pensions?