Aisling Moloney

So another half a billion or another quarter of a billion, which makes it all a half a billion.

has not been spent and it went back to the exchequer.

So we see there the taxes that we are being told we're paying to fund climate action measures, half of it went back to the exchequer and half has been sitting there unspent.

Exactly.

So with the carbon tax, what happened between 2020 and 2023, there was around €258 million that wasn't spent and they put it back into the Exchequer.

And this story I have today is about combining that with the Climate Action Fund, which has been left sitting in a bank account.

Now, the government are saying that they've committed to funding climate action projects with some of the money in the Climate Action Fund to the tune of about €200 million going forward.

But...

the money is still in the bank account at the end of 2024.

So you might have allocated it, but nothing has been administered.

And you're talking about four years where money was accumulating and nothing was, or a large portion of it, should I say, was not being administered to schemes and pushed out to help fund climate action measures.

Now, the government are saying, and as I said, I can't see the 2025 financial statements, but the department in a statement told me that 2025 was the first year that the fund was in deficit.

So, i.e., they spent all of the money that came in that year.

And they said that this is part of a multi-annual project.

But I think people who have been paying these taxes on their fuel over the last number of years, I suppose in good faith that they were going to climate action measures, but

We may be disappointed to hear that they're either being put back into the government exchequer fund overall or they're sitting there waiting to be administered and not yet spent.

Yeah, so in that essence, I suppose that basically the 2025 was the first year that the Climate Action Fund's operation in which expenditure from the Climate Action Fund exceeded its income.

And as I'm reporting between 2020 and 2024,

they weren't spending all the income, they were leaving a surplus.

So they are saying that this reflects the multi-annual life cycle of projects supported by the Climate Action Fund.