Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

Obviously the Government has two years to run and we have to try to achieve as much as possible. In many areas we have already achieved our commitments in full while in others we have not. On the issue of beds, a further 200 are being put in place. We are using also an enormous amount of private beds which are already built. That is not what we had envisaged but it is a more effective way of putting beds in place. We bought in several hundreds of private beds rather than the State building them.

On the issue of schools we have exceeded the expenditure we envisaged putting into the capital programme. I gave the figures yesterday. We put in approximately €2 billion in recent years into the schools building programme, far more than we envisaged at the time. In recent years, under the national development plan we spent €19 billion, €3 billion more than intended. In regard to the projections for the period ahead, admittedly the five-year envelopes in the Department of Finance are rolling and go beyond the life of this Government, expenditure of €36 billion is provided for in the capital programme up to 2009 which is way ahead of what would have been envisaged in the economic model of 2002.

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