Mr. Conor O'Kelly:

I cannot comment on PPPs I am not involved in. We are involved in schools bundles so I will take that one for a moment. Schools bundle 5 is a very interesting situation in that, as the Chairman will recall, Carillion in the UK went bust and a local contractor in Ireland, Sammon, went into liquidation. One of the big issues with PPPs is, often, when something like that happens, whether the State will end up picking up the tab and the risk will transfer and stay with the private sector. In schools bundle 5, which the National Development Finance Agency, NDFA, had full oversight of, all those schools were built and completed at no extra cost to the taxpayer. The contract was intact. Other directly provisioned schools Sammon was involved in when it went into liquidation ended up costing the State very significant amounts of money. It is a great comparison to look at schools bundle 5 following the collapse of Carillion and Sammon, what happened to those schools being built and who paid for them. I think the Chairman will find that the PPP contract for schools bundle 5 stood up very strongly.

I know that sometimes, maybe, it does not. It is all about that contract, what is in it and how robust it is. We learn all the time and contracts get better and better, but the schools bundles is a very interesting example of where the PPP contract stood up and the taxpayer was not out of pocket.