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

Absolutely. I am sure that can be done.

I am going to have some new Cabinet sub-committees. I think there were too many, quite frankly. I am going to reconfigure them into a smaller number of Cabinet sub-committees which, of course, I will chair. They need to be more focused. We will have a new ten-year plan on infrastructure, which we hope to be able to publish in October or November. I anticipate that there will be ambitious capital programmes for both health and education. In health, this will provide for additional bed capacity and upgrading or replacing some of our existing hospital stock. There will be something similar in education. It is a long time since there was public money put into capital investment in third level. That will need to be done. We do not yet know how big an envelope we have for capital spending in the next ten years. There are lots of moving parts in that regard. It will be as big as is possible without contravening fiscal rules or jeopardising the finances of the State.

I am very supportive of the Technological Universities Bill and want to see it go through. I should admit that I have a constituency interest in it, namely IT Blanchardstown. I would like to see the legislation pass so that IT Blanchardstown can combine with IT Tallaght and DIT into a new technological university. I am very much behind it being fast tracked. The Minister, Deputy Richard Bruton, tells me they now have an agreement with the TUI, the union that represents the lecturers. They have amendments to the Bill. The next step is to go to Cabinet with the amendments.

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