Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)
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The Deputy has raised a number of questions. There is a tad of normal cynicism from the Deputy. He is neither for nor against things. He is half for and half against them, but I suppose that is a good way to be.

On the target, I do not have a piece of paper to prove what I have said on the record. In the original documentation, the paragraph that has been quoted so often is predicated on the outcome of an bord snip. The understanding the former Administration gave - the Deputy may or may not take my word on this, or he may take up the phone and talk to the Commission and Frank Stakely will tell him his understanding - was that €5 billion from the bord snip portfolio would be available to retire debt. It took us a fair job of work to dislodge that idea from the troika's perspective.

It is true there is a figure of €2 billion in the programme for Government. Fine Gael came in with a much higher requirement to sell because it did its own due diligence and determined that when the economy was starved of cash, it wanted to create a new entity called NewERA to recycle money from older companies that were up and running that could stand on their own in the private sphere and create new State companies. I thought that was not a bad idea, but believed the scale was too ambitious and we agreed to scale it back to €2 billion. After that, I then had the job in Government to convince the troika to allow us to use that €2 billion, when we got it, to reinvest in the next phase of jobs, both in the private and in the public sphere. That is what we are about and that is how the increase to €3 billion came about.

Deputy Fleming is correct that the increase was a brokered arrangement, arrived at over protracted discussion and months. We had to dislodge the troika from the position it had. We were dealing with people on whom we were dependent to fund our systems month by month. I believe the deal we made was a reasonable deal and I have outlined the initial step - the 50:50 step - to the deal and the advance on that, which in essence in the medium term allows us to use the full 100% stakeholding we get from the sale of State assets to invest in jobs.

Deputy Fleming suggested the fact Coillte forests and the stake in Aer Lingus are not for sale now is a broken promise.