Mr. Fergal O'Brien:

Our views on sustainability and infrastructure investment priorities are predominantly contained in our national planning framework submission from earlier in the year. We have a significant section in that on sustainability, priorities in energy use and transport, as well as a spatial pattern perspective. I would be happy to come back to the Deputy on the specifics.

I know headlines were taken from it on the connectivity of our regional cities by high-quality road. We very much continue to support that agenda. We think it is crucial that before we move on to 21st century objectives, we finish the 20th century infrastructure objectives which we have not done. In our national planning submission, we worked with businesses in all the regions and identified public transport priorities for the cities of Waterford, Limerick, Galway and Cork, as well as Dublin, which we have targeted for both short-term, medium-term and long-term priorities. Much of that is bus corridors and, in some cases, rail investments. Obviously, within the greater Dublin area, we have short-term priorities around rail investment.

We would be very happy to share the detail of that with the Deputies subsequently.

On the child care issues, in terms of our priority from a business perspective, we would have an economic efficiency view but, at its core, it goes back to the issue of choice for working parents. We fully support Deputy Ryan's view that people should have the choice to care for children in the home. We fully support that choice for men and women in working families, but we believe choice is being limited now by the economic realities of prohibitively high child care costs and the way we structure our income tax system, which does not make it attractive for a second earner to go to work. We believe we can respect and support the role of parents within the home while at the same time giving more choice in those cases where both parents choose to work. Our system currently does not do that when we consider our exceptionally high child care costs.