Mr. Tony Murphy:

There is a taxonomy, as the Deputy will be aware, that is already in place and, again, we do not set the taxonomy rules. They are in place and we just see how they are implemented. There are two aspects, one of which is the normal budget, where we said there was an overestimation whereby it was supposed to be €260 million but it was overstated by €78 million, or whatever the figure was.

Probably more worrying is the recovery and resilience facility, RRF, which is basically the flagship programme of the new European Commission. It is extremely complicated and difficult, so I do not want to go into the details of it, but there is a risk for the EU now because some of these funds are green bonds. There is now an obligation, therefore, to the market as well. People are investing with the idea that their investments will be really invested in green. In Ireland's RRF plan, about 42% of expenditure will be green, including for the electrification of the Cork railway and a few other measures to improve efficiency in public buildings and so on.

The problem with the RRF, however, although I do not want to get into it because it is a completely different ballgame, is that the plans were based on estimated costs and member states then just tagged expenditure items as green. That was then taken as green expenditure whether the expenditure in the end was half of that or not. Again, we are looking at the RRF as a delivery instrument, and it is really complicated and I do not want to cloud the issue. My point is it is very important for us to check this level of green expenditure on green bonds.

The case the Deputy mentioned regarding the 100% involved an IT system that had been put in to manage a hydroelectric plant or something, but it had no greening impact at all and maybe had the opposite effect. In another case, there was a power plant where no account was taken of the environmental impact of taking it in.

We do a sample. We cannot do every single transaction. What we are saying basically is, based on the sample we did, we reckon there is an overestimation of that amount.