Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 27 September 2011
182 Deputy Pearse Doherty asked the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform if Ireland is currently in receipt of, or has applied for, any joint European support for sustainable investment in city areas funding to invest in sustainable urban development and regeneration projects. [25985/11]
Amharc ar fhreagraAs the Deputy will be aware, Ireland was allocated a total of €901m in Structural Funding for the 2007-13 programming period, with €750m assigned to the Regional Competitiveness and Employment (RCE) Objective. Ireland's National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF) sets out the policy context through which the RCE allocation may be applied. This is implemented through three Operational Programmes: the Border, Midlands and Western (BMW) OP, the Southern and Eastern (S&E) OP — both co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) — and the Human Capital Investment OP, which is co-funded by the European Social Fund (ESF). The balance of €151m is for smaller Territorial Cooperation programmes including PEACE III, INTERREG IVA and the Ireland Wales programme.
The EU Commission developed four joint initiatives in co-operation with the European Investment Bank (EIB) group and other financial institutions in the framework of the 2007-2013 programming period. Two of them refer to the promotion of financial engineering instruments (JEREMIE and JESSICA). The other two (JASPERS and JASMINE) operate as technical assistance facilities.
These initiatives were examined when Ireland's ERDF Structural Programmes 2007-13 were being developed back in 2006/7. However, primarily because of the scale of operations required to secure EIB participation, the availability of credit at that time and the level of structural funds allocated to Ireland, it was not considered suited to our Structural Funds programmes.
In any case, it should be noted that as Ireland has sufficient expenditure in the ERDF funded OPs to draw down our full structural fund allocation, no additional funding would have been made available.
The regulations governing the 2014-20 round of structural funds are expected to be published shortly and I will be examining the detail to see if the use of such financial engineering instruments will be appropriate for our structural funds programmes for this period.
