Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for his intervention. If money from any source is available this year, the priority must be road maintenance. Some of the country's roads are in a bad way and need money to be repaired. It is important to make a distinction between Exchequer money and PPP money. By and large, the latter comes from the private sector - for example, banks, bondholders and other groups that enter 30-year contracts to build and maintain roads and lease them back to the State. It is a different way of procuring roads.

We want a pipeline of PPPs ready. The pipeline was blocked for four years because of the financial crisis but has started to trickle again. For example, the Newlands Cross and N11 projects have been signed off and will go ahead. If we can move ahead with the Gort-Tuam project, which is the next one on the list, and the Enniscorthy and New Ross roads, we want another few projects in the pipeline to enter the system. The irony is that the projects must be large, amounting to hundreds of millions of euro. There are better projects that are much cheaper, but they cannot be pursued because they would need to be done using Exchequer funding.

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