One group that will no doubt welcome the Government's decision on Public Private Partnerships is National Toll Roads, the company set up 10 years ago by Tom Roche and his family with a lot of institutional backing to build and run first the East-Link and the West-Link toll bridges.

These toll bridges are a bit of a variation on the PPP projects proposed by the Government and its adviser Farrell Grant Sparks. The two toll bridges pass into local council ownership after 30 years and in the case of the East-Link, Dublin Corporation and Dublin Port & Docks Board already get a 40 per cent cut of the toll revenue.

In the case of the West-Link, the Government gets a cut once toll revenues reach a certain level and last year, NTR paid more than £2.4 million to the Government under this arrangement.

Ten years on, NTR is a veritable cash machine, churning out profits last year of £11.3 million on revenues of just £18.3 million. Most companies would drool over those sort of margins, but for the Roche family and NTR's big institutional backers like Standard Life and BIAM, the question is what does NTR do next?

Hefty dividends are one thing £6.6 million was paid out last year but institutions at some stage will want a mechanism to put a value on their investment and a market listing is the most obvious way of doing that.

Tom Roche jnr, who runs NTR, has said in the past that a market listing is an option, but that the group would need a big infrastructural project with which to go to the market. So far, NTR's plans for a landfill at Mulhuddart and an east-west tunnel from Dublin Port to near Heuston Station have been rejected, while bids for the incinerator in north Dublin and the peat-fired power station in the midlands have been rejected. All that NTR has on its plate at the moment is a widening of the West-Link to six lanes.

Now with the Luas underground section, the Dublin Port tunnel, the Southern Cross motorway and the by-passes around Drogheda and Dundalk all earmarked for private investment through a PPP, NTR will no doubt be hoping to make its mark.

Incidentally, the motorway bridge across the Boyne which will be part of the Drogheda bypass looks like being quite an extraordinary structure and will be the State's first suspension bridge. More than 200 metres of the bridge will be cablestayed from a pylon which will be 93 metres high. To the non-metric, that is over 300 feet high (say twice the height of Liberty Hall or 1 1/2 times Cork's County Hall).