Brian Cowen (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)

That is the largest allocation ever made for the capital programme in education. It is true that some of that construction activity offsets the reduction in residential housing output but not to the full extent. We all know that. We are also aware that we doubled construction industry employment levels. While employment levels in the industry will be reduced this year from 300,000 to 240,000, when we came into office only 120,000 workers were employed in that industry. While I do not have the information in front of me, I would like to know what the capital budget for schools was in 1997, but I am sure it was a lot less than it is now, and I would expect it to have been so.

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