Public Expenditure Policy
Dail Éireann — 2026-02-12
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Ged Nash (LAB), Louth

We will be watching this very closely. The reason we gave the report a fair wind was because of the dire situation with infrastructure in the country. According to the IMF and others, our infrastructure is about one third behind comparable countries. Accountability is key because that has been one of the significant missing pieces. The problem is that if it is everyone's responsibility, it is nobody's responsibility.
Ultimately, the Minister will be chairing the task force. My understanding, from re-reading the report yesterday, is that where issues around delays occur, the infrastructure division of the Department will deal with them but they could potentially be escalated to the task force and subsequently to the Cabinet subcommittee.
Mention was made of sanctioning Departments and agencies that are not performing, for example. It would have been a perverse situation if this kind of process were in place in recent years, given that we have had the Department of housing overpromising and under-delivering for years. We could have a situation in the annual budget round and the Estimates process, where the Department of housing, in the context of what the Minister is seeking to do here, could essentially be sanctioned with a reduction in its budget for not performing. Are financial penalties for under-delivering Departments the kind of thing we are talking about in this regard?

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-02-12/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:02+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-02-12