Mr. Fergal O'Brien:

I will start with Deputy Lahart's questions and my colleague, Mr. Brady, might respond to some of them. I will comment again on our USC policy. It is very much a labour market policy. As the Deputy said, everyone pays USC but many businesses have made the point to us that it also means that a significant proportion of USC income is outside the labour market because it is on other income, not just work-related income. That means spending a great deal of money for a reduction in the USC but limiting the economic impact to jobs in the labour market because it gives benefits on other, non-work related income as well. It is, therefore, diluting the bang for one's buck in terms of tax reform expenditure. We see that as a missed opportunity. The Deputy is right that everyone benefits from it, including middle and higher income earners, but the benefit will be very limited. We again refer to the fact that our tax system is out of line with the rest of Europe by being so narrow and having such a low effective tax rate at below average earnings. That is the issue we believe must be addressed.

The Deputy is correct to point out that a significant number of projects were finished during the past ten years. It is interesting that the Deputy mentioned the schools. Much of the reason we were able to complete some of those school bundles was that we used public private partnerships, PPPs, when Exchequer resources were extremely tight. We have been quite concerned to sense a resistance - we do not necessarily see an official position on it but we sense it - to rolling out more tranches of public private partnerships for other types of infrastructure. There is also a PPP break built into the public capital programme which we believe should be examined. An arbitrary cap has been set in the public capital programme for public private partnerships which I believe is unnecessarily limiting us. The reality remains-----