Mr. Ray O'Leary:

The A5 motorway is a high level political commitment by the Irish Government in the context of the agreement framework of the Stormont House Agreement. It is not really contingent on British membership of the EU or issues relating to Brexit, but clearly that is a challenge which people on both sides of the Border are getting their heads around. It remains a political commitment, however, in terms of the overall settlement framework. I cannot comment much more than that because of the nature of the commitment. Deputy Catherine Murphy also raised the same issue and it is part of a higher-level political commitment.

In terms of local improvement schemes and community improvement schemes, we will come back to Deputy Fitzpatrick with a detailed note as he was asking for figures about which local authorities are making allocations in those area.

Let me reiterate again the local improvement scheme does not apply to 83% of the road network because it is an allocation for private roads. The position remains that local authorities can make allocations for the community improvement schemes and local improvement schemes, but the difficulty is that at national level, if we had kept a specified pot for either we would simply have had to cut the overall road maintenance budget. The overall restriction that was there was the framework within which we had to make those allocations.

There was a question on the future of PPP projects. The position under the current capital plan is that there are no additional road PPP projects, that was a policy decision at Government level. What might happen in the context of a mid-term review will be a policy decision at Government level.

In looking at the priorities, we will be keeping an eye on the emerging national planning framework as well in trying to identify how we should prioritise our investment. If I can add a note of caution, members spoke about a great many good projects this morning. Even in the context of the mid-term capital review, we will have many good projects which were highlighted by the committee and for which there will be a case made by TII. However, they will all see the scope to accelerate some of the existing projects under the capital plan. Unless we are very lucky in the capital plan, it will be difficult to do them all. We will be working with TII to see what the best phasing is for any additional resources we get.

Mr. Michael Nolan has spoken several times about the many projects ranging from very large to small ones that are at various levels of development that Transport Infrastructure Ireland, TII, could valuably do. We, along with our public transport colleagues, will be making those cases but it is difficult to divide up the cake for everybody in time. The case put by the company is also important to note in that context. I would signal that slight Civil Service note of caution.