Mr. Brian Cowen:

They fed into the budgetary process for '05, which is what I asked for. And the reason why I did it, Deputy, was that that's the way I ... to do a comprehensive review of what's happening. For example, some of the schemes were kept for another while, like the nursing home scheme. We wouldn't have been able, if you were depending on public State tendering and doing it in the traditional way, we wouldn't have produced the number of nursing home places as quickly as we needed to produce them at the time when the demand was coming up in the system. That's very clear and that's accepted in various Finance Bill discussions that took place at the time.