Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

To return to an earlier question, the Minister of State, Deputy Kitt, checked a detail for me and it appears subhead Q refers to the MacEntee commission. For some reason, this small provision must have been called "commission of investigation" before the other subhead was inserted. It is, however, the same subhead.

On the M50, the committee has been discussing the detail of the enhancement work on the M50. As the Deputy knows, an examination is taking place of what can be done about more modern tolling and is looking, in particular, to the Hong Kong model of tolling rather than barrier tolling. The committee has not come to a conclusion on the matter.

We will have a number of tolls, including a toll road in Cork, in the not too distant future. It is inevitable, as happens elsewhere, that tolling will make a contribution to the huge amount of resources which have been spent over the past decade and will be spent over the next decade. Having looked at some of the figures given to the committee recently on tolling in other countries, the cost of tolling here is low.

On PPPs, a great deal of progress is being made. In the early years the trouble was that only a handful of mainly British-based companies considered PPP projects. Obviously, if there are not enough PPP projects, it does not justify such companies setting up offices and schemes. Since then, the National Treasury Management Agency, through a body affiliated to it, the National Development Finance Agency, NDFA, has started to look at PPP projects and deals with them in a very different way. They have looked internationally at how this is done. We are increasingly finding that it is better to take PPP projects away from Departments and by operating them in a different way, we are getting much more competitive interest. There is no doubt, however, that it is costly. In some respects, it is good if there is an insufficient supply of projects because it would be ridiculous if much of our national wealth went into investment for PPPs in other countries, which cannot put it into their own countries. That is what is happening because quite a lot of the investment money is going into large infrastructural projects outside Ireland, such as roads, tunnels and bypasses.

The PPP system has the benefit of being able to get that money into our system. We should do that increasingly because it makes great sense to do so. Obviously, one cannot share out the contracts because it must be a competitive position, but it is in our interest, as the Deputy said, not to have a cartel comprising just a handful of companies. The only way of doing that is to spread it among companies that do a lot of work internationally, which is what is happening. Our capital programme for PPPs may be small in international terms, but at least they can see that there are some sizeable projects. We can see the benefits of this, including the new road which was opened the other day. I do not wish to be critical of anybody, but we know that those huge savings would not have been achieved by taking the conventional route. As the National Roads Authority becomes more efficient in using the new systems it has introduced, there will be many mechanisms through which we can obtain better value for money and part of that can be done through the PPP system.

A section of the National Development Finance Agency is working on this matter, which is part of the National Treasury Management Agency. This year the staff have done a really good job in internationalising this to bring people together and generate far more interest in projects here. We have seen that happening recently in the development project at Fatima Mansions and a few other projects will come on stream in which there is considerable private sector interest. They concern projects which I did not think would attract private sector involvement. In this case, Dublin Corporation is involved in renewal projects at a significant cost and there are huge attractions in such projects.

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