Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

We have looked in the past at a number of PPP projects but not in the roads area. We have looked at them in education, the convention centre and the courts. One of the points we have made in the past is that the evaluations that are done around the decision-making to choose to use PPP as the vehicle for delivery are not published so there is little information in the public domain for people to understand why it is, or how it is, that PPPs deliver value for money. I have always argued that this is something that would be useful in adding to the public debate and in gaining community support for choosing PPP as a vehicle. I have also pointed out that there is an obligation under the public spending code that there be post-implementation evaluations of capital projects. It applies to all capital projects but that also applies to PPPs. Other than in the roads area, there has been little of that done. In fairness to TII, including when it was National Roads Authority, it carries out the evaluations but they are not published. There is an opportunity there to contribute to public debate around that by publishing at least some information in respect of it and I have made a recommendation to that effect, which the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform supports but, obviously, the Department is not the commissioning authority for PPPs. It relies on TII, the Department of Education and Skills and so on to do those exercises.

We have not done an international comparison piece around that. Different issues will come up in each area and, therefore, the Deputy should look in the first instance to TII to demonstrate that here, as elsewhere, PPPs deliver good value for money and similarly for other organisations.