Departmental Strategies Dail Éireann — 2026-07-07 ============================================================ Mairéad Farrell (SF), Galway West I am probably one of the people who is most looking forward, apart from the Minister of State, obviously, to reading the strategy. I hope that it will look two things. First, the economic impact we can have with the money that is spent. That impact can be huge, economically, socially and environmentally. There is a massive impact we can have, particularly if we look at what has happened in places like Preston, for example, and how measures there have worked. The strategy also needs to look at cost overruns and at how public money is wasted. The legislation I brought forward this time last year, in respect of which the Government kicked the can down the road, suggested that information should be provided in an annual report by the Minister to show the type of procurement procedure used by public bodies, the use and type of social clauses in contracts, details on contracts awarded to SMEs and a scoring of the performance of contractors in the context of whether they go over time and over budget. Will the Minister of State commit to looking at that? --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-07-07/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:07+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-07-07