Niall Collins (Limerick County, Fianna Fail)
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467. To ask the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport the funding allocated here to a fund (details supplied) in each of the years 2014 to 2020; and the amount spent in each of the years 2014 to 2017 and to date in 2018 in tabular form including the breakdown between Exchequer funding and EU funding to same. [11684/18]

Shane Ross (Dublin Rathdown, Independent)
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A total of 18 Irish transport projects have been selected under the 2014-2016 EU’s Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) calls for funding, with one further Irish project selected for funding in December 2017. This includes projects where Ireland has joined with other Member States for funding for multi-beneficiary actions.

Irish beneficiaries have to date received over €58 million for projects on Ireland's core Trans-European Transport Network. This figure does not include funding where Irish project promoters have successfully joined with project promoters across other EU Member States. These would include successful applications for the deployment of Single European Sky Air Traffic Management Research (SESAR) and road transport projects with other Member States, which includes studies on the harmonisation of interoperable intelligent transport systems (ITS) and cooperative Intelligent transport systems (C-ITS).

Details of all of Ireland’s successful projects are available on the INEA website:

The following table gives a breakdown of the €58m from 2014 to date. It details the year in which each grant was agreed by the EU and the proposed implementation period for each project. The EU funding provided is not readily available by year.

Funding under the CEF is delivered in the form of grants allocated following competitive calls for proposals. There are at present two open calls for CEF funding (under SESAR and CEF Transport Blending) and I expect a number of Irish project promoters to submit applications under these calls. There may also be further calls for CEF funding between now and 2020.

The Department encourages operators in our transport sectors to explore all avenues of finance available for capital investment projects including domestic banks, the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF), as well as the European Investment Bank (EIB), Irish Strategic Investment Fund (ISIF) and the European Fund for Strategic Investment (EFSI) in order to secure the most suitable funding instrument at the most favourable commercial rates.  In many cases, a mix of funding instruments is used for capital projects by ports, roads aviation and public transport sectors.

*This grant agreement will be formally signed in 2018.