Brendan Ryan (Labour)

That and much more I would say. That does not prove I was inefficient. It was simply the way it was done.

I will return to the subject. The answer to the question of whether we are getting extra funding is "Yes". Are we getting a sharing of risk? In some cases the answer is undoubtedly "Yes" and in the case of schools the answer is "Yes". Are we getting good value for money? In terms of educational infrastructure, the jury is out. We do not know enough. I have no doubt that the quality of what people have to work with is excellent, but it is questionable whether that quality could be delivered by other mechanisms, including that of giving poor unfortunate school principals a reasonable budget for maintenance and reasonable secretarial support so that they would not have to spend most of their expensive time chasing after routine minor matters. It is also questionable whether the procedures the Department of Education and Science uses for evaluating major capital projects, the five stages, could be improved. In the case of a number of building projects in my place of employment in the Cork Institute of Technology, I took the liberty of making a freedom of information request to consider them. Whatever the Department of Education and Science achieves in terms of avoiding extravagant expenditure or perhaps in eliminating fraud is swallowed up in costing increases arising from delays. If one takes five years to complete a project that could have been completed in a year, at 5% or 6% construction inflation, such delay will add, in crude terms, 30% to the price. If one ends up saving 5% of the ultimate price by putting up the overall price by 25% instead of 30%, that is not a contribution to efficiency, although it might be a contribution to probity and rectitude and to keeping people honest.

This raises questions about, for example, bond issues where the State agrees to pay back a bond. That is called borrowing. I am not overly impressed with the efficiency of the Irish private sector and I never have been. The cost overruns in the early days of the NRA were not all its fault. They were to do with the capacity of those in the construction industry to fairly well trowel on the expenses when they were perhaps not being watched as carefully as they should have been. There was not much sign of competitive efficiency there.

It would be improper of me to talk about public private partnerships in general terms and not mention the Cork School of Music. It is not the greatest advertisement for the principle underlying such partnerships. I accept fully that once a public private partnership contract is signed and delivered, there is remarkable efficiency in the construction of a project. That happened in my place of work in the National Maritime College. As in the case of the Cork School of Music, if it takes four or five years to get to the stage of signing the contract and one ends up with a very efficiently and rapidly constructed school of music, which is being delivered six years late because it took five years to start the building project, there is a legitimate argument that we would have been better off to proceed the old way if work could have been started five years ago. Such delay has incurred a major cost which does not show up in the assessments of the Comptroller and Auditor General.

Our public sector is not good at project management. Good project management means that one is properly prepared before one starts. Clearly, we are not good at that, given the nearly €500 million worth of hospitals around the country that were built without any proper planning as to how they would be staffed and run once they were completed. That is the antithesis of what one would hope would come out of a public private partnership, which means that whoever provides the facility must deliver everything, including all the ancillary and support services apart from the teachers who will work in the school.

We are not yet beginning to do a proper evaluation of public private partnerships. I do not have a brief one way or the other, except that I believe it is a good thing if we can get extra funding to do things now which would otherwise be postponed for four or five years. If we get that extra funding we must accept that those who provide it are entitled to a reasonable return on their investment. We must also be sure that the return on their investment is reasonable. Furthermore, the fact that they provide a good service which turns out to cost three times as much as the old way — I do not say it does but if it does — we should be told that in terms that make sense to all of us.

If a wonderful toll road, such as the one in the Minister of State's constituency from Portlaoise to beyond Cullahill, which it is hoped will start in the next year or so, produces a mile long queue of people waiting to pay their tolls at any busy time during the day, it is a failure. On the Sunday of last year's All-Ireland Football Final, gardaí had to instruct the toll operators on the M1 to raise the barriers because there was a four or five mile tailback north of the toll plaza. If a company cannot operate tolling on roads in a way which does not seriously impinge on the free movement of traffic, good transport infrastructure will not be achieved. That is what has happened on the Westlink on the M50. It is time this problem was dealt with.

I am at a loss to know how the Cork School of Music has got into its present situation. My colleagues in the school have worked hard. Everything that was ever asked of them was delivered properly, on time and in the manner required. We ran into an extraordinary confusion in which the Department of Education and Science was left holding a baby which was the property of the Department of Finance because that Department had run into some statistical issue which had nothing to do with the Cork School of Music. It had to do with borrowing for much bigger projects, which would have added significantly to the level of national debt and would have been perceived as such in terms of the Stability and Growth Pact. I accept there was a problem. However, the Department of Finance never came out in public to say the problem was of its making, while the poor Department of Education and Science got stuck with attempting to explain why something which was not of its making had to be dealt with by it. I never saw the Department of Finance explaining in public what was the problem.

That is a very good example of how a basically good idea can be undermined. Public private partnership is a good idea provided we have effective cost criteria, effective performance evaluation criteria and effective sharing or transfer of risk from the State to the private sector. We are only beginning to learn. I invite the Minister of State and the Department to work at developing criteria which are objective and independent and which evaluate how well these things work.