Between €500 million to €1 billion is to be invested this year by the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund (ISIF), bringing the total committed to €2 billion to €2.5 billion, its director, Eugene O'Callaghan has said.

He was speaking at the launch of a report that said that at the end of 2014 €1.4 billion had been committed, of which €726 million had been drawn down.

The investments were into activities that employ 8,362 people directly or indirectly, with 48 per cent of the investment in Dublin and the rest spread elsewhere around the State. A total of 79-Irish-based companies or projects received funding. Four investments are made directly, with the rest by way of funds ISIF has itself invested in.

The sovereign fund, which is using money formerly in the National Pensions Reserve Fund, has a “novel and challenging mandate”, Mr O’Callaghan said, which involves seeking out commercial investments that generate jobs and economic activity in the State, while not simply displacing other sources of investment but rather supplying funding to projects that would not otherwise receive the necessary finance.

The fund is designed to eventually have a discretionary portfolio worth more than €7 billion. Given that it aims to team up with co-investors from the private sector, the planned funding could eventually equal up to ten per cent of Gross National Product.

Mr O’Callaghan said that some of the investments have been into businesses that were having difficulty getting finance because of the condition of the banking sector. He said Ireland was emerging from a “debt-fueled financial crisis” and it would be up to 20 years before the banking sector was “back on an even keel”. However, it was the ISIF’s experience that the sector was improving.