Mr. Steven Burgess:

Everything that has been said is true. Perhaps there is confusion on how the process is followed. The sponsoring and sanctioning authorities are responsible for identifying the projects to be prioritised within their respective programmes.

The sanctioning authorities are those responsible for identifying what projects are to be prioritised within the programme. We are all aware the list of projects people would like to bring forward is a lot longer than the list there.

We liaise with each of the sanctioning authorities. In the case of primary care, we liaise with the HSE. In the case of the courts projects, we liaise with the Courts Service and with the Department of Justice and Equality. In the case of Grangegorman, we work with the Grangegorman Development Agency and DIT. We had prior engagement with them as the Grangegorman project had been announced previously, but was deferred in the previous budget. We were looking to re-engage and restart on that process.

In the run-up to the eventual definition of what was termed the "stimulus package", we had been liaising with the HSE as part of our normal ongoing engagement with it in terms of project and finance advice. In that conversation, the prospect arose that the primary care programme could, perhaps, be a candidate for being delivered by way of PPP, since there were insufficient Exchequer funds and the lease model that was being pursued was not having the desired delivery effect. We had those broad conversations and we had certainly advised the HSE that we believed the primary care programme had suitable characteristics for it to be a successful PPP, as has happened in other jurisdictions, not least the United Kingdom. Therefore, those conversations had taken place.

What we are trying to convey, however, is that in terms of deciding how much of a project or how many projects would be brought forward and what the overall budget levels for those would be, the NDFA plays no role. We can advise as to the likely success of a project as a PPP and whether there is a market for it, but the decision is ultimately for the sponsoring Departments and the Government as to the overall ability to fund a programme and the scale of that programme. As Mr. Murphy has pointed out, one of the key inputs we were providing was to assess how much could likely be afforded. The Comptroller and Auditor General has properly identified the long-term commitments such programmes generate and what was reasonable. That was a decision for PR.