Mr. Peter Walsh:

After the July meeting of the board. As the Chairman will know from our appearance before the committee in April, inflation was a significant concern across all of our contracts and activities. We need to honour our contracts, and our toll contracts have within them a consumer price index, CPI, indexation to cover the increasing costs the toll operators are suffering. There are 250 people who work in the toll companies that operate the 300 km of PPP toll concessions. They are people going out, clearing accidents, replacing barriers, replacing signs, surfacing signing, lining and all the rest. They are real people. The increasing costs for the materials, labour and all the rest is being suffered by those companies. The contracts have within them a mechanism to change the toll charge in accordance with the CPI. We would be the very first organisation to hold the PPP concessions to the conditions of contract. We cannot pick and choose but must apply them, which is what we were flagging. We did not mean to imply at any stage that we had discretion in this regard. We do not. The only reason we are going back to talk to the PPP companies at this stage is because the three leaders of the Government parties decided last night that this is a task they had given us to do, and as an agency of the State, of course we will do it.