Whether it's the Balbriggan bypass or the Killarney road interchange, the chances are that any major road improvement project or by-pass near you has been brought to you in large part courtesy of the European Cohesion Fund.
The fund, established to help the EU's poorest four states, is targeted exclusively at transport infrastructure and major environmental works, notably in Ireland's case, water.
Some 115 projects have been approved for funding in the 1994-1999 period. They range from the upgrading of the freight-handling capacity at Dublin Airport to improving the Dublin-Galway rail track, to the purchase of the Cork Harbour tug or the dredging of Waterford Port.
The first stage of the Limerick city water supply upgrade was part-funded, as are 14 similar projects currently under way in Dublin, Tuam, Waterford, Tipperary, Monaghan . . . Twenty-five waste water projects are also under way from Lough Swilly to Tralee.
Cohesion funding has its origins in the gradual development of regional policy from the 1960s arising from economic evidence that the benefits of economic integration would be felt unevenly. Regional funding at a puny level started from 1975 and increased incrementally until 1987 when the Delors I package doubled the level of cash for distribution as structural funds and established the framework of "objectives".
The specific targeting of a special Cohesion Fund to the poorest four states, Spain, Ireland, Greece and Portugal, would come yet later with what was known as Delors II in 1993, and was very much the price extracted by them for the commitment to complete the single market and launch the single currency.
The package agreed at Edinburgh committed some £12 billion to the four over six years, worth in total £1.1 billion to the State. And, although linked politically to helping them converge on the Maastricht criteria and hence participate in the euro launch, there was no requirement for funding to be cut if a state did make the grade.
The eligibility limit was set at 90 per cent of EU average GNP per capita and remains there, allowing the Republic to creep in by the skin of its teeth in the Agenda 2000 package with a figure of 88 per cent of the EU average for the key reference period.
The Commission is now proposing a Cohesion Fund of £16 billion and has suggested a review of eligibility after three years at which point the State will certainly have passed the threshold. The introduction of an annual review of eligibility, suggested by some of the budget's big contributors, is, not surprisingly, viewed with hostility in Dublin.
So was the Germans' suggestion that participation in the euro should preclude access to the fund, now replaced by a proposal for a formula which would relate the amount paid out to the recent economic performance of a state. That is scarcely less palatable.
The State is also less than enthusiastic about a suggestion included in the latest German compromise paper that Cohesion co-funding for projects could be reduced if states do not apply the "polluter pays" principle. The absence in the State of any tax directly related to taxpayers' water consumption is viewed in Brussels as a breach of the principle.
Dublin is hoping to secure an allocation of between £600 million and £700 million during its eligibility in the first four years of the budget period.
The effect of the funding should be considerably greater because both the Commission and Government are keen to encourage greater use of public-private financing in these areas of traditional State spending.