Mr. Peter Walsh:

I would not suggest that for a moment. Agencies of the State are given responsibility to look after various elements of the State and in the process they do a very good job of it. However, they may not be very flexible when it comes to accommodating projects that are going to impact significantly on whatever aspect of the State they have been made custodians of. It might be helpful if I give an example of what worked well. The NTA is the approving authority which will answer to this committee in terms of any public transport projects, light rail and metro. TII did Luas cross-city through the centre of Dublin with many stakeholders who were worried about the impact it would have on their livelihood and their viability. That was not an unreasonable worry. A stakeholder forum was convened by the Minister for Transport at the time and we were required to report to that forum on a regular basis. At first I was surprised because I thought nobody had a contract here so how did we expect it to work, but it worked. It worked because when these meetings were coming up, the question an individual had to ask himself or herself was whether he or she was really going to go into a forum with all the people who would benefit from the completion of this project and say his or her sectoral interest is such that he or she was willing to impede the project. My experience of it was that they did not. They went to those meetings-----