Mr. Peter Walsh:

I cannot speak authoritatively on the means of management around their major capital programmes. I believe there is not the same level of uncertainty. We do have contact through the European organisation CEDR for road authorities throughout Europe. It is not that they are not suffering constraints in funding - a lot of the countries are dealing with ageing infrastructure and are very concerned about the amount of money made available to renew that infrastructure - but certainly there is not the level of uncertainty year to year. Having said that, where contracts are entered into here, the State honours them. Having gone through the approvals and awarded the contracts I would not anticipate any uncertainty about funding being provided in order to meet those obligations. Some years ago we did have multi-annual funding programmes and that is very helpful because it does allow one to plan in a much more confident way. I believe the Department of Transport aspires to providing us with multi-annual funding profiles in the order of four years. We have yet to see it and discussions are under way at the moment but it would be very desirable. I cannot say, however, that I could point to another jurisdiction and say exactly how it works there. Perhaps my colleague could.