Mr. Michael Kennedy:

The National Transport Authority has 13 road public private partnership contracts, of which eight are toll concessions. In the case of six of those schemes, the entirety of the traffic risk was transferred to the private sector so it would take all the hit in terms of whether demand arises or not. In the case of two of them, as Mr. Nolan explained, there was a sharing of the risk. The more recent schemes and the more common method of public private partnership in Ireland is that the State pays the full amount to the private company. This is what happened in our last five schemes, whereby the private sector funds, designs, builds, operates and maintains the scheme but we pay the entirety of it and there are no user charges. In a way, the Limerick tunnel is a mix between pure transfer, which was a great thing to get for us back when we did get it, and what we got in the more recent schemes, which is where the State pays all of the payment for the road in question.