Matt Shanahan calls for transparency in €10bn capital plan

I'd like to associate myself with the remarks you made there about the treatment of the Israeli government on the Palestinian people. Tanaiste commitments made to our national recovery include one of the largest taunches of capital investment ever announced in this date. €10 billion on capital projects this year, with government projections indicating upward momentum in capital spending, with an additional €15 billion to be spent by 2025. This is great news, Tanaiste. Great news for every child in substandard classrooms, every patient in substandard hospital settings, commuters on substandard infrastructure. This money must positively impact every Irish person. Getting to this position is a political and social achievement brought about by national sacrifice, seen through a decade of financial hardship and hard choices accepted by our population. Few governments in the history of our state have ever been in a position to give the people of Ireland the services they deserve. The schools, the universities, the hospitals and clinics, the housing and municipal infrastructure, investment in the arts, sports, roads, cycleways and railways. Indeed, few governments have also had the ability to so positively address the challenges that climate change is presenting to our society and ultimately to our economy. Tanaiste, we need to spend this money wisely and well. This will require political discipline, political oversight and scrutiny, as well as tenacious and vigilant project management. I will contend our methods of oversight are not up to the task, Tanaiste. PAC and CAG, good as they are, are no match for the scale of ambitions and responsibilities in spending this money. COVID spending has taught us strong lessons in the difficulties in making good investment decisions when urgency and large capital outlays combine. We will be back in the heaping place in no time to Tanaiste if we fritter away this money on political codology, vanity projects and possibly stroke politics. My constituency, Waterford, has suffered by not having political clout for most of the history of this state. In saying this, I am very conscious that my own existence as a TD comes from the anger in Waterford and the South East for not having the services normal in other parts of the country. We have been losers in the race to the Cabinet table, having only had three senior ministries in the last 33 dials. Maybe we will get our elbows at Cabinet again, but I would prefer if we evened up the game. The real problem is that we cannot see where money goes. The simple act of presenting historical capital expenditure of completed projects by not through regional analysis and by county would transform our national understanding. I believe such reporting standard needs to be made a national priority. Our country can have mature conversations about capital allocations and equitable investment priorities. But I think in so doing we need to have oversight and we need to have adequate understanding of how capital decision making is made. I hope this is something that you can see about implementing Tanaiste. Thank you very much for the question. The Government is engaged in a huge programme of capital investment in public infrastructure in Ireland at the moment, under the banner of Project Ireland 2040. It is 10 billion euros a year, money which we may struggle to spend this year because of the delays in construction, but still a massive budget of 10 billion a year. The biggest ever investment programme in public infrastructure in the country, creating jobs all over the country and also providing new public infrastructure for our citizens. It is social housing, budget for 9-10 thousand a year, new schools, hospitals, healthcare centres, sporting infrastructure, community infrastructure, renewable energy, retrofit, the national broadband plan. And like all parts of the country, Waterford benefits from the investment in the North Quays, which I know Deputy Shannon and I are huge advocates for. The investment in University Hospital Waterford, the Dunmore Wing now open, the second lab at long last under construction. The national broadband plan of particular benefit to rural parts of Waterford. The Greenway built a huge asset and in the not too distant future the Technological University of the South East centred in Waterford City. These are huge investments by Government that I believe will help to transform that region and particularly Waterford City making it the capital of the South East, attracting investment, attracting jobs and attracting a population. That is the vision that we have in Project Ireland 2040 for Waterford City and for the South East region. In terms of what the Deputy says in relation to transparency, I think he is probably right. This is a huge budget, 10 billion a year. There may well be a case and I think there is a case for further transparency as to how the money is spent, how we make sure that it is spent well. And I know the Minister McGrath will welcome any proposals that the Deputy has in that regard. And I would like to see Government doing detailed analysis of that because I think one thing such analysis would show is that the idea of having a Cabinet Member at the table is probably overrated in terms of the amount of capital investment that a particular city or a particular constituency gets. Maybe things used to work that way, but they don't anymore, particularly with the Public Spending Code in place. And also I think some of the analyses that we see done by interest groups and academics is misleading. For example, they will exclude any investment less than 20 million or any investment less than 50 million. And of course, in areas of a low population and rural areas, investments tend to be of smaller amounts. They are spread wider and that creates the false impression that urban areas are doing much better than rural areas. And also it doesn't fully take into account, for example, the value of nationwide investments like road maintenance, for example, or research grants or the National Broadband Plan, for example. But I know different countries use different models. There is a state agency, I think, in Australia that is in charge of capital development. Lots of good ideas, and I would certainly welcome hearing them. Thank you. I will be quite happy to sit in on some of your Cabinet meetings to see whether or not that is the case that not being at the Cabinet table has some influence. I believe reporting from our departments are inadequate for us to discharge fully the responsibilities of budgetary oversight of our House. And I believe also Government needs to do more in demonstrating equitable investment decision-making and providing the evidence that supports it. I would point out to you that Dublin has a quarter of the population of the country, and yet it receives approximately half of all capital investment in the State. I would also point out in recent parliamentary questions I gave to the Higher Education Authority, questioning $998 million of capital investment over the past decade, the Department was unable to provide me with a breakdown of projects supporting that spend. So, I think we do have an issue in this. As I say, I certainly look forward to engaging with you and Minister McGrath and maybe coming up with some further initiatives that I think would hopefully help us to share the burden and shed light on these decisions. Thank you. Minister McGrath. Thanks very much. Again, I broadly agree with the Deputy's remarks. We do have systems, of course, to monitor capital spending, not just the Public Accounts Committee, but also the Controller and Auditor General, although that is largely retrospective, and also the Project Ireland Delivery Board. So, there are mechanisms in place. Could there be greater transparency? Can they be improved? I think they can, and very much welcome any suggestions from the Deputy in that regard.