We know its value but what is the cost?

There's no shortage of statistics on the euro. We know that if the 14.5 billion new bank notes were piled high, they would be 55 times the height of Mount Everest. And laid end to end, they would stretch to the moon and back four times.

The one area about which the hard facts or figures are slightly harder to find, however, is the small matter of the changeover bill. The clear and available information on the issue is limited, or at least that was the case when The Irish Times attempted to establish a figure last week.

Questions on the project's cost to the Republic seemed to be on a par with "how long is a piece of string?" in that virtually no interested party would venture an exact answer.

The ambiguity makes it easy to understand why so many consumers fear that the ultimate name on the bill will be their own.

The most clarity on the matter was to be found in the Central Bank, where spokesman Mr Neil Whoriskey said that £70 million (€88.9 million) of Exchequer funds had been invested in the changeover. He said that around two-thirds of this had been used for materials for the production of notes and coins, with the balance comprised of bills for new equipment and facilities, such as storage.

Where the rest will end up is a little more vague but a hint was provided by Central Bank governor Mr Maurice O'Connell earlier this year when he addressed the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Finance and the Public Service.

Mr O'Connell said that, since the Minister for Finance has ordered that banks should not impose a handling charge on frontloaded euro cash or on the lodgment of Irish banknotes and coins until mid-February, the Central Bank will pay a fee to the banks in part compensation for the fee income they will forgo. The cost of this was estimated to fall somewhere between £5 million and £6 million.

The good news for the Bank, however, is that it won't all be "spend, spend, spend" on the changeover.

"We'll be selling on the Irish coin for destruction," said Mr Whoriskey.

"How much we make all depends on what comes back, so we have no final figure on that."

At the forefront of the public euro campaign is the Euro Changeover Board of Ireland, the body also charged with overseeing the implementation side of introducing the new currency.

A spokeswoman for the board said that it was "difficult to estimate" the budget at this stage, since the length of the project could not be determined until the success of the changeover was judged in the first few months of 2002.

The spokeswoman reckoned since the board began operations in mid-1998 around £20 million has been spent, the money again coming out of Exchequer funds aside from a small annual grant from the European Commission.

This outlay has gone into press, television and radio advertising, postal campaigns, and the euro converters that have been dropped through every letterbox in the Republic, which itself cost about £3.5 million.

Staff costs are a minimal aspect of the overall expenditure since the board is peopled entirely by staff on secondment from the Department of Finance.

The burden of informing business about the changeover has fallen on policy body Forfβs, which introduced its campaign in December 1996.

To date, about £4.7 million in Exchequer funds has been spent, around half of which has been spent this year.

Again, advertising has sucked up much of the cash, with the rest going on directed information such as the provision of 60,000 changeover kits for retailers and 23,000 information packs for taxi and hackney drivers.

At the Office of the Director of Consumer Affairs, meanwhile, the concentration has been on building awareness of the National Code on Euro Changeover. This code of conduct is designed to protect consumers against unscrupulous retailers that attempt to use the changeover as an excuse to introduce price hikes.

The code campaign began in September this year and is expected to cost around £500,000 when completed, with the money again coming out of State coffers.

A similar Exchequer budget has gone into the advertising and information efforts of the Revenue Commissioners, where a changeover guide was produced for all businesses.

A Revenue spokesman said that technology costs associated with the changeover had largely been mixed in with Y2K and general online services expenditure, and were thus impossible to quantify.

An Post, on the other hand, confirmed last week that it had invested about £8 million on the machinery and technology required to bring the organisation up to speed for handling the euro.

In addition, more than £4 million has gone into ancillary outlays such as printing new stamps, forms and information leaflets.

The money has been allocated from An Post's own funds.

Then there are security costs. The Garda Siochana was unable to provide estimates for overtime necessitated by the changeover, saying only that an exact figure would probably be available in January.

In the private sector, things are also uncertain, since the changeover is self-funded by so many different parties.

The Small Firms Association (SFA) has estimated that the Republic's 160,000 businesses will incur costs of about £800 million in relation to the euro, with software, printing and signage expenditure high on the list.

The figure, says SFA director Mr Pat Delaney, is based on information provided in surveys conducted among SFA members, with this averaged to include businesses of other kinds. It includes the £300 million that the Irish Bankers Federation expects its members to have spent between 1999 and the end of the project.

Individually, Bank of Ireland has estimated the cost of the project at £84 million, while AIB expects it to cost around £56 million.

It is important to bear in mind that these figures, and all the other estimates currently in circulation, are far from definite. A small implementation disaster caused by Christmas storms could, for example, add a zero to the bill here and there.

Based on the information to hand, however, it won't be surprising if the combined public and private sector changeover bill rings in somewhere between £900 million and £1 billion. That's €1.27 billion in the new money, for those of you who don't have your taxpayer-funded euro converter to hand.