Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy and will reply to the questions he has put to me. The first one is on the two roads that the Deputy referred to, the Shannon Foynes road and the Adare bypass road. I know as well as the Deputy where those projects stand at the moment. They both face journeys in the planning process and so on, but I believe it is important that yesterday I and the Government made clear our support for those projects in the long run. It will take time for them to move forward. I am familiar, as the Deputy is, with the history of the Adare bypass and everything that has gone on but it is important that the Government has indicated that strategically it believes that these projects have to happen. When they move to their respective planning and tendering processes, we will be committed to finding a way to make them happen.

The Deputy has talked about tourism and about festivals, in particular. He met with members of my office about that recently and I was briefed on it. I know where the Deputy is coming from in the sense that there are some larger festivals at the moment that command a fair bit of support. I will differ gently with the Deputy and say that we do not give a leg-up to anybody and we certainly do not give a leg-up to any familiar faces. We look carefully at how money is spent and we have changed the amount of money that we have made available to particular festivals on the basis of how we believe they perform. I accept the Deputy's point that new festivals that are trying to get up and running cannot provide the track record of how they performed in the past because they did not exist. That is to state the obvious. This is something that I will discuss with Fáilte Ireland to see if there is any way of dealing with this.