Tom Parlon (Laois-Offaly, Progressive Democrats)

I do not want to get into this issue in too much depth, but the pass was designed with the best expertise of the Central Fisheries Board and the OPW. It has been found somewhat deficient and every effort is being made to sort that out. However, having visited it yesterday, I must say that the main reason that such a great deal of money was expended was to avoid flooding. I hope that Kilkenny will never have a flood again. If it does, the rest of the country will be deluged. It is a superb and extremely attractive scheme. It had to take into account that Kilkenny is a very famous medieval city and that we disturbed some extremely dangerous PCBs in the river bed that had to be dealt with very carefully, something that happened to most people's satisfaction. I know that people in Clonmel would immediately embrace a scheme such as that in Kilkenny. We hope to be able to move forward with that before the end of the year.

Senator McDowell was generally very positive and acknowledged the work done by the Government. Along with some other speakers, he mentioned PPPs. There is provision for PPP investment to the tune of €3.7 billion in the 2005 to 2009 envelopes. The Government is fully committed to the PPP process. It has taken longer than anticipated to open up the entire flow of PPPs. It is a new form of procurement for the Department and the private sector has some suspicions. Four of the biggest decentralisation projects are to be part of PPPs and I believe that the national conference centre is in the final stage of such a contest. We will see that manifest itself a great deal more.

I regret that Senator Ulick Burke always finds the glass totally empty. He made a very strong attack and it was interesting to hear the contrast with a Senator from Sligo who lives on the same side of the Shannon. It was as if they were on different continents, not to mention in the west——