I certainly acknowledge that there is a risk of a deficit for 2024. It would not be credible if we were to fail to acknowledge such a risk in light of the recent history of Supplementary Estimates being needed for the Department of Health over many years and those Supplementary Estimates being in the context of either deficits or new policy measures being taken by the Department with, of course, the support of the Government. From a funding point of view, however, I would make the case that the level of funding tha…

What the Deputy is referring to is the funding that was made available for ELS in the summer economic statement. That is a standard feature of the Estimates process. I would have indicated this when the summer economic statement was published - if not at the recent committee meeting - and certainly on many other occasions. A standard feature of the Estimates process is that the amount of money that is needed for ELS changes during the Estimates process. Mostly, the ELS figure goes down. I can remember one occasion …

As a division of the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform, the Office of Government Procurement, OGP, is responsible for national procurement policy, the national eTenders platform and for sourcing common goods and services. The OGP engages with stakeholders on an ongoing basis and has engaged with the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, CCPC, which is the statutory body responsible for promoting compliance with and enforcing competition and consumer protection…

Regarding the powers that are available to the CCPC, in 2022, the Competition Act 2002 was amended in 2022. The Competition (Amendment) Act 2022 transposed Directive (EU) 2019/1 of the European Union to create a specific new criminal offence of bid-rigging. That Act identified several practices that would be deemed to be criminal behaviour, some of which the Deputy just described. The reason that change was made was to ensure the CCPC would have sufficient enforcement powers to combat bid-rigging effectively. We do…

At this point, and the Deputy has acknowledged this by the information she is both sharing and not sharing here today, it is important to afford due process. If the Deputy has concerns she believes are worthy of investigation, it is important that the relevant bodies are contacted and the information is shared with them. I will simply assure the House that my view is that our procurement practices are conducted in compliance with the law. The OGP, both directly and indirectly, seeks to create an environment in whic…

The operation of the health service budget for 2024 is, as is the case with every departmental budget, a matter for the Minister for Health and his Department. It is the responsibility of that Department to decide how it allocates funding of €22.5 billion to respond to the many legitimate demands and needs our health service faces at the moment. It is important to note that since 2019, this Government has prioritised very significant and unprecedented investment in the health service. As a result, Ireland continues…

The question the Deputy put in written format is a little different from the questions she is putting to me now. I want to answer them all in the interests of transparency for the Dáil. I will first deal with the questions the Deputy has just put to me. Do I accept that it is very difficult for our hospitals and the HSE to influence the level of demand for health services in the short term? Yes, I do. Across the medium term, it is possible to influence that level of demand through measures we take to improve the he…

Absolutely.

We will continue to find ways to make progress on Sláintecare.

It is important to acknowledge that progress on Sláintecare falls under four different pillars, namely. affordability, accessibility, better outcomes for patients and reforming our health service. With regard to affordability, I thank the Deputy for acknowledging the progress that has been made in respect of inpatient hospital charges, the expansion of free GP care, what we have done in the drugs payment scheme, what we are doing regarding diagnostic scans for patients, free contraception for women up to the age of…

Excuse me. We are now also making progress on assisted human reproduction. These are measures that are going to continue across this year. We will ensure the commitments we have made in these areas are delivered upon. We will find ways to continue the momentum on Sláintecare, for example, through the opening up of new hospital beds and the delivery of medical care professionals where they are needed, in line with what is funded. That will continue. Sláintecare is about more than just affordability. It is also about…

The NDP sets out an ambitious programme for public investment in Ireland of €165 billion. This expenditure will be pivotal in delivering the vital infrastructure we need to support our future climate, social and economic requirements. In 2023 and 2024, over €12 billion and €13 billion, respectively, will be made available from the Exchequer for investment in public capital projects. This funding will provide more schools, homes, hospitals, road and public transport projects. To put this in context, capital expendit…

There has been an increase in capital investment but the increase in capital investment is in line with the indications we gave for the national development plan a few years ago. The reason we make decisions years in advance to increase investment is to give our economy the ability to organise itself so that it is able to build and transform this higher level of capital spend into output, into new schools and new homes being built, and into the national broadband plan being expanded. On the point the Deputy has mad…

Of course I am committed to how we can maintain and grow the capital investment in our economy, but I do not have a guiding anchor of what it should be as a share of GNI* that supersedes the fact that I had to make decisions regarding how we allocate money that is available to us. The first ordered decision is how much money is available to the country and whether we are going to reduce our surplus to increase more in capital investment. That is the first ordered decision and it is a decision made in conjunction wi…

I thank the Deputy for the question. Expenditure Report 2024, published on budget day included budget Estimates. These budget Estimates for public services set out the allocations for the following year for each Vote at programme level. This represents a high-level summary of the budget and allocations for the following year. The Revised Estimates Volume for Public Service, REV 2024, outlines further information setting out the detail of allocations under each programme at subhead level. It also outlines the high-l…

I thank the Deputy very much for his comments and, of course, I am well aware of my duties to the Dáil and the need to put forward factual answers to questions the Deputy raises, which at all points I endeavour to do. I will just deal with the different layers of the question the Deputy has put to me. First, on the obligation we have to those looking for hospital and medical care within hospitals, this is the reason in my time as Minister for Finance and before that we enabled and added 22,000 extra staff to our he…

Again, I believe it is important to put this budget in the context of recent spending decisions. Over the past eight years, we have seen an effective doubling of our spending within our health services. Over recent years, we have seen an increase in investment in our health services of between €6 billion and €7 billion. We have seen very significant and needed increases in funding for health services at a time when they continue to face very many demands. I will continue to work closely with the Minister, Deputy Do…

I propose to take Questions Nos. 7 and 36 together. The Government has committed to €165 billion in capital investment through the national development plan published in 2021. As a percentage of national income, annual capital investment is now among the largest in the European Union. In 2023, almost €13 billion will fund vital infrastructure in areas such as housing, transport, education, enterprise, sport and climate action. Achieving value for money and reducing cost and schedule overruns form a vital part of de…

The process for that tends to be that Ministers and their Departments identify any individual project, particularly high-profile projects, that may be affected by the impact of inflation and some of the other factors the Deputy has touched on. In the past year or so, we still managed to make progress on the majority of such individual projects, moving some of them to construction, a number through the planning process, and others through the business case evaluation process within my Department and the parent Depar…

I will do my best, and I thank the Leas-Cheann Comhairle. I will deal with each of them in turn. On Deputy Durkan's point, I took care with the words I used earlier in my first answer to him. I said projects would be moved along, but of course it is the case that many projects are not hitting the original timings that were anticipated for them. So many capital projects have been affected by where we have been with inflation and the unavoidable consequences of our construction sector being closed for so long during …