Mr. Seán Ó Foghlú:

The allocation for 2013 is €14 million for emergency works. It is hard to disagree with the statement that we need some investment, and some investment would be very helpful. We have prioritised, within our investment, the replacement of prefabs. That is how we would see that as being the best investment of the available funding. We must be realistic about the capital budget available to us. The Government has prioritised the delivery of school places and we are fortunate that is the case. We do not have significant other funding available to us at the moment.

That is one of the reasons we are maximising the use of public private partnerships with schools. The choice of schools for public private partnerships often relates to their need for refurbishment. The model is most effective and efficient when the school will be as full as possible when first opened. With new schools being started off, such as a new post-primary school, for example, the public private partnership process involves a group of schools going through the process together. If there are planning difficulties with one, the group of schools can be delayed, which can then have a knock-on effect on new schools being established. We must be very careful about that. In any of bundle of public private partnership projects, we tend not to bundle five new schools that need to open in 2017. Instead, we consider where there might be one or two new schools but we might have a number of schools where there are amalgamations or replacement schools, and in this way there is a varying need of different types of schools. We must be realistic that money is very tight on the capital side and we are doing our best to prioritise within that.