Duncan Smith (Dublin Fingal, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I will return to the tolling aspect of the debate and pick up on some of the points made by Deputy Lowry. When it broke in the back half of last year that the tolls would be increased because of the indexation, it was paused but the pause has now ended and the increases will come on stream. It was clearly communicated that the reason is that there is indexation in the contracts and all the rest. Mr. Walsh replied in his response to Deputy Lowry that it would have been difficult to get people to run the contracts if they did not have indexation attached. Notwithstanding that, we have highly profitable roads. We have a PPP on the M50, for example, that has been fully paid for and is returning large amounts of profit to the State. You can see the disconnect for the ordinary person who has to use these tolls every day. These are not anti-congestion measures either; people have to travel long distances to work or whatever the case may be. Is there another model that is used elsewhere for tolling that TII is looking at for when these contracts come to an end, or does it imagine that the contracts in their current form will be rolled over with superficial differences?