Mr. Noel Waters:

It is a point, and I do not dispute that, but the downside is that it would require significant capital expenditure on the part of the State. I take the Deputy's point about the numbers of people coming into Europe which impacts on Ireland, but there is no guarantee that they would be needed in ten, 15 or 20 years' time. Our colleagues in The Netherlands found themselves in that exact situation. They had acquired significant numbers of properties for the state and found five years ago that they had to offload approximately 15,000 spaces onto the market. That demonstrates the difficulties. We are committed as best we can to having an open tendering competition and we remain in close liaison with the OGP with a view to ensuring that.