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

That is fine. The reality is that when it comes to the delivery of the national broadband plan, an important school or important health projects, the majority are delivered on budget. If they are not delivered on time, it can be because of delays that take place in the planning process. We are not in a position to control the planning process. We are in a position to control the legislation around it, but not the decisions that An Bord Pleanála makes and that the judges make to respond to concerns that citizens may…

One minute the Deputy is talking about overspend and the next he is talking about cyberattacks. The Deputy pretends - I say pretends because I find him entirely unconvincing in his arguments - to be making the case for the stronger State and the State doing more. I thought he was a left-of-centre politician when it came to the role of the State, but he does not appear to give the effect of that in the tone he uses about the State. It is of course the case there are individual projects the State acknowledges it got …

Is the Deputy going to make reference to all the flood relief programmes that work? Is he going to acknowledge any of them? He brought up ventilators a moment ago. He is just the sort of Deputy who would be excoriating the Government if the ventilators were not available in the first place. We were in a crisis situation at that point-----

We were trying to save lives at that point.

I can understand why he is behaving the way he is, a Leas-Cheann Comhairle-----

-----it is absolutely fine. The Government was trying to get ventilators at that time because we were in the middle of a global health emergency. It is frankly below the Deputy to bring into a debate like this the attempts that were being made to source ventilators for our country in the middle of a health emergency.

I acknowledge, and have done on many occasions, the mistakes and things we got wrong-----

-----in relation to the national children's hospital, but we will hear that from the Deputy. For a man who pretends to believe the Irish State can be the source of more answers to many of our difficulties-----

I will conclude on this. We will never hear the Deputy acknowledge that the Government, the State can do anything right-----

-----and it can, it does and he does it a disservice.

I thank the Deputy very much. The infrastructure guidelines were indeed published in December. They had an effective date of 1 January 2024. As a result, they are already in effect. My Department has refreshed the requirements for capital projects in the new infrastructure guidelines, reducing the number of approval stages prior to implementation from five to three and streamlining the requirements for major projects, raising the level of cost at which a project is considered major to €200 million. This allows for …

I will look at three factors. The first is whether the projects individual Government Departments decide to go ahead with are still within budget, that is, still in line with the original expectations set for the project. Second, I will consider whether the guidelines have led to an increase in the speed at which decisions are made and projects brought to tender. From my engagement with my officials and with other Departments when we were making these changes, I understand that the improvement in speed that could b…

My understanding is that, if housing projects are very closely related, there is an opportunity to bring forward a single application to the Department of housing. I will have to check that for the Deputy. I will do that. I believe the Department of housing will be eager to avoid cases in which two or three different housing projects offering different forms of housing come under the one application. If they are genuinely three different projects, it would not really be appropriate to group them under a single appl…

The Deputy asked me about 2025 and 2026. For 2025, at €14.35 billion, the spend will be 4.5% of GNI* and for 2026, with an allocation of €15.45 billion, it will be 4.6% of GNI*. Those are the figures. In fairness to the Deputy, she raised this issue at the very start of questions to me but the answers were under Question No. 58. That is what the figures are.

Yes, I answered that. We set a target of 5%. We are getting towards that target. We are making progress towards the delivery of it. I will go back to the point I made at the start of my exchange with the Deputy. Looking at the increases in capital expenditure year upon year upon year, between this year and next year there will be an increased spend of €1.2 billion. Capital expenditure for next year will go up by 9.7% versus the previous year. That is three to four times the rate of inflation. The question for all p…

I appreciate that. I am not familiar with the detail on the schools the Deputy referenced. I do not want to do them a disservice. However, no matter how much more money is available to the Government or how much it decides to spend, there will always be a higher demand than there is money available to meet that demand. That will always be the case. Anywhere any Minister goes, there is a demand and need for more schools and Garda stations to be built, and for more investment in our health services. By making additio…

I thank the Deputy for his question. We have identified a number of constraints in delivery of the national development plan. To facilitate an exchange with the Deputy, I will pick two. First is the availability of the workers we need to translate spending plans into delivery of homes and projects and the labour and skills shortages in our economy. We are looking to address that through progress being made in the Department of further and higher education in relation to apprenticeship plans. While progress there wi…

I would have to identity inflation as the biggest challenge we have faced, given the cost of raw materials we need to deliver homes has increased in the way it has, with a knock-on effect on many buildings our country expects us to deliver. That, by some way, has been the biggest challenge we will have had in recent years. While I am hopeful it will improve, we should not be naive in assuming improvement will happen quickly. It will take time to begin to see the cost of building projects stabilise. That is why we h…

We are in a position to drill down into it. Unfortunately, the answer has been both simple and very difficult. The cost of inputs has gone up so much, including wood, steel and other things we needed in recent years to turn our money into projects the country wants. It has got far more expensive to build. In terms of indications that it is beginning to improve, at this point any evidence I have is anecdotal from talking to officials about delivery of projects. I have received anecdotal feedback that tendering proce…