Mr. Robert Watt:

We meet once a week as a management board for about an hour. At those meetings each member of the management team sets out the issues for the week and we run through legislation, what is happening in the Dáil and so forth. We have a management forum every third or fourth week where we discuss things in more detail, including policy issues that colleagues want to bring to the table. The Minister sits in on the meetings. Once every four or five weeks, he will come along, discuss his priorities and check with colleagues about how we are getting on with those.

In the run-up to the publication of Project Ireland 2040, discussions on the capital plan with the Minister, the Taoiseach and the Government and colleagues in other Departments would have been on the agenda pretty much every week in the formulation of the plan because it was a key part of what we were doing. In the run-up to the budget, every Monday morning we discussed progress on the budget in respect of current spending and overall capital spending. The main focus tends to be on the larger budgets so most of the conversation would be related to social welfare packages and current spending on health, including medical cards and so on. There would also be issues relating to education and justice but most of the time, as the Deputy knows from her own time in government, focus is on the larger spending Departments. In the run-up to the last budget there was not a significant discussion on capital spending because it is, in effect, locked down in the main because we have a multi-annual approach to such spending. We have five-year plans and we have a ten-year plan-----