Mr. Fred Barry:

There is no single point at which one says one has enough money or not enough. There are shades of grey in this. If we have a few years of the current funding level we will see a reversal of much of the good work done in recent years. We are in contact with the Department on it. I appreciate that everybody is looking for money from the Department of Finance and we all understand the Government has to deal with a very difficult situation so we are not raising this issue as a complaint about this year's situation. We are one of many organisations that could do with more money, but we are flagging the situation because we do not want to sit here in a few years' time with this committee and have people ask why we did not flag that. The choices being made here have implications.

On the Gort to Tuam road, the Government announced a PPP stimulus programme around this time last year. As part of it, the Government committed to pay the State's costs for three road PPPs, one of which was the N17-N18 Gort to Tuam project. That allowed us to reactivate a competition that had been under way for some time but had not got very far because we did not have the money to pay for the State's input to it. We have reactivated it and are at a point with the preferred bidder that we are collectively engaged with potential debt-funding organisations. The PPP funding structure is typically that the promoter of the scheme, the PPP company, puts in a proportion of the costs involved in developing the scheme out of its own money - an equity contribution - and borrows the larger part of the balance from various debt-funding organisations such as domestic and international banks.

The European Investment Bank usually contributes to Irish PPP schemes and will contribute to this one. International banks walked away from the Irish PPP market some years ago. To fully debt-fund the N17-N18 scheme we need to get contributions from offshore banks, because the scale of it is beyond the capacity of domestic banks to fund, although they are participating. The alternative fall-back plan is that the National Pensions Reserve Fund will commit the balance of the debt funding. Our first objective is to get the international funding. Those efforts are under way and we should know by September or October this year whether the balance of the funding can be got from that source. If not, we will be looking to the National Pensions Reserve Fund.