Mr. Fergal O'Brien:

I will respond to the Deputy's questions about education, Brexit and investment before handing over to Mr. Brady to talk about social housing, state aid and the enterprise model. We have already spoken about the need for infrastructure. The other crisis in our economy is the lack of spending in education, particularly in higher education, which was a real victim of the downturn. We are asking the higher education sector to do more and more in terms of volume, activity and expectations, but we are not resourcing it. It is clear that despite the vagaries of the international rankings, our universities are not performing at the level that is needed. That there are three Scottish universities in the global top 100, versus the situation in Ireland, gives us an indication of how far behind we are and where we need to be.

I will explain why we favour the fees and loan model. We have the fees right now. The fees are the registration charges that people have to pay to go to university. We do not have any support framework around those fees. We think the solution to the higher education resourcing problem should have a number of parts. The State will need to pay more. Employers are happy to have a conversation about how they can contribute to the cost of higher education. We spoke about the reform of the national training fund that is needed. If we are serious about getting enough resources into higher education, we need a proper fees model. I would respond to the Deputy's concerns about access by saying that if the model I have mentioned is accompanied by a sufficiently robust system of loans, access difficulties should be no worse than they are now and most likely will be better than they are now. We currently have fees without a proper loan model. We would favour a proper loan model supporting a sustainable fee structure in the future. At the same time, the State should be spending more money on higher education and employers should be coming to the table to make a contribution.

The Deputy also asked about investment. I would like to share with the committee a statistic that relates to the 4% target. We have seen public debate in recent weeks about the allocation of an extra €2.6 billion under the mid-term review of the capital plan. An extra €6.5 billion will have to be spent if we are to reach the 4% investment target by 2020. We are a long way short of that target, even with the potential additional commitments in the mid-term review. That might focus the mind when consideration is being given to the impact of the annual budgets over the coming years.