Oh my God. That is desperate.

I thank the Deputy. As Minister for Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform, I am responsible for setting the overall capital allocations across Departments and for monitoring monthly expenditure at departmental level. The responsibility for the management and delivery of individual investment projects, within the allocations agreed under the national development plan, rests with the individual sponsoring Department in each case. Each Minister is responsible for deciding on the priority pr…

I thank the Deputy. In the written parliamentary answer she shared with my Department, she referred to capital spending based on the targets set out in 2021 and we interpreted the question as meaning the expenditure targets that were set out in 2021. I will certainly ask my Department to see if we can come back to her about what the expenditure would have been if it was based on a share of GNI. The language that was included in that development plan set a target. We also have many other targets that need to be deli…

Across the same period, capital expenditure has increased considerably. In 2021 it stood at €9.78 billion. That was an increase of 19.8% versus the previous year. From 2021 to today, this year, it has increased from €9.78 billion to €13 billion. There has been a very big increase in the overall rate of capital expenditure. This has been done not just to cope with the effect of inflation and the cost of raw materials, but also with a view to increasing output and allowing the State to do more. There always will be a…

The Minister for housing has indicated that the level of housing targets for the years ahead is something he is considering. The Deputy will be aware that the Government agreed in March to the deferral of the approval of a revised national planning framework, and to set out a revised timeline for the process. This is informed, to a significant degree, by census data. The postponement of the census in 2021 due to the pandemic resulted in the delayed publication of crucial census outputs relating to housing and demog…

The publication by the Government tomorrow morning of the latest update on the delivery of the housing action plan will show the progress we are making in the delivery of our housing targets. The Deputy only has to look at the figures for the first quarter of this year - the number of commencements and the number of homes currently being built - to see that we will do more than deliver on our targets for this year. That, in turn, will set the foundation for the delivery of more homes into the future. If we are to m…

I do not understand the Deputy's argument. It does not make any sense to me. If the Deputy is acknowledging on one hand that the capacity is not there, how is creating a State entity overnight immediately going to create that capacity? I do not see how that can be done.

The Deputy is acknowledging that the capacity was not there for some time because our construction sector needed to grow. Regardless of whether the State or a private sector developer was trying to employ them, the reality is that we were constrained because we did not have enough people available within our country to build the homes we need. That is improving. We are beginning to see more people working in the construction sector than we have seen for some time, in part due to the work that is under way with an i…

My Department's primary role in regard to PPP contracts is to facilitate the PPP process centrally by developing the general policy framework, including where necessary the legal framework and the capital investment policy framework, within which PPPs operate and by providing central guidance to Departments and other State authorities in that context. PPPs are partnerships between the public and private sectors for the purpose of delivering a project or service. Some of the advantages associated with them are that …

The concept of privatisation implies that there is a public service being delivered in the first place that is then discharged out to the private sector. As the Deputy already knows, the reason I separated the different PPPs is that we tend to have the public service being delivered for a project that has been built by the private sector. A wastewater treatment plant is a good example. By delivering it via PPP, we got a new plant and we get the staff to manage it. When talking about privatisation, it is not the cas…

From the information I have to hand, it does not appear to me that there has been a drastic use, or increase in the number, of PPPs. In the case of, for example, the social housing PPPs, across two different bundles they relate to 1,000 homes nationwide, which is a relatively small share of the total level of social housing that is being delivered. The majority of it is being delivered either directly through local authorities or through approved housing bodies, AHBs. In various policy areas, it appears the use of …

I propose to take Questions Nos. 49 and 54 together. What does the Deputy mean by "capacity"? Does he mean numbers of people? Does he mean bricklayers, carpenters and plumbers?

Regardless of whether the State or the private sector was seeking to hire them, they were not available in the quantity we needed in recent years. That is the key point I am making to the Deputy. If they were not there to be hired, changing the nature of the employer would not have made any difference. What we are doing to build up capacity involves the steps that were taken by the then Minister and now Taoiseach, Deputy Harris, and are now being continued by the Minister, Deputy O’Donovan, in respect of apprentice…

That is exactly what the Government is doing. How are we going to get more companies involved in the building of homes if Deputies like Deputy Boyd Barrett always take the view that any private sector company getting involved in the delivery of building a new home is suspicious? The Deputy sees it like that. On the one hand, he is lamenting that we do not have larger companies involved in the delivery of building more homes, but at the same time, he is the very first Deputy to be critical – at times, highly critica…

This politics is performative for the Deputy. He knows our local authorities are building more homes. He knows more money is going into the local authorities to do this. He knows our delivery of social housing is increasing year after year. He is aware of the efforts being made, including in apprenticeship programmes, to make construction a more attractive career for people to go into. The Deputy knows all of this. I find it extraordinary that a man who does not have a good word to say about the operation of econom…

We are clutching at straws here. The Deputy is acknowledging that local authorities are building more homes.

Is the Deputy acknowledging that local-----

I have tonnes of social houses in my constituency. They are run by Dublin City Council. It might matter to the Deputy whether the private sector is recruited by a local authority-----

It might matter to the Deputy, but what about the person who is going into that home? We are trying to have a debate and I am giving the Deputy facts with which he is clearly uncomfortable. He does not like when I challenge the ideologies that he wraps around housing. If the local authority is using private plumbers and bricklayers and small to medium-sized construction companies to deliver more local houses, it does not matter to the person who is moving into one of those houses as to who built it. I can see that …

Will the Deputy name a school that has gone over budget?