Mr. David Moloney:

Absolutely. We indicated earlier in the year that we are reviewing the public spending code and we are replacing it with a set of infrastructure guidelines to simplify the code, to reduce the number of decision stages in it to three stages. We hope that from the point of view of the regulatory burden the code imposes, that this will strike a proportionate balance between the need to ensure value for money and the need not to block or slow down projects. I point to the MetroLink as a good example, where in the business case for the MetroLink; our piece of that is the easiest piece in many ways. It is an enormously complicated business case to pull together so the Department of Transport would have spent a great deal of time pulling that together. All of the evidence that we can see internationally and what the International Monetary Fund, IMF, tells us is that a properly scoped and specified project has a greater chance of succeeding in a timely way and in a budget sense. It is that balance between the investment that is needed in that piece and a sense of proportionality. That is what we are going to do with the public spending code, for example, with regard to the requirements for the threshold for the more detailed analysis, which has been raised from €100 million to €200 million per project.

We are conscious of the need not to get in the way and to support delivery and we have taken steps in order to do that.