Matt Shanahan demands transparent regional breakdown of capital spending

I've got a mark at Glasgow and Cora. Tarnished I of significant concerns regarding the absence of publicly available data on government spending, which I have raised with you before. Capital spending in particular is a black box. We see the money going in, some £87 billion this year, £12 billion of this on capital projects, with £165 billion heading out the door by 2030. And we see bits and pieces of the outcomes, often just the stuff that gets attention, the calamities or the patronage. How can this House provide parliamentary oversight on public spending when appropriate, standardised spending data is not provided by your government departments? Budget 2023 is being framed at the moment and this Dáil knows virtually nothing of the choices and plans. PQs on spending are answered glibly if answered at all. Ministers usually pivot away from the questions asked. PAC and CAG only provide lookbacks to identify failures in process. Our national economic dialogue bizarrely operates with virtually no standardised data. To honest to this House offers benedictions rather than debate over voted expenditure. The capital tracker, a welcome gesture towards better data, has withered, becoming more opaque with every subsequent version. It is simply impossible to see where public money goes. Vast parts of Ireland feel now they are frozen out of a fair share of capital spending. The Midlands, the North East, the West and my own home region, the South East. It is these regions that have turned their backs on the traditional parties of government. My personal analysis suggests that the bulk of discretionary spending is being funneled into Dublin and Cork, home to almost all our ministers. Do not tell me I am wrong tarnished to our name checks on projects to me in my neck of the woods. Show me where the totality of money is going. Publish proper granular spatial data on public spending, particularly capital projects. If not live or future looking data, the least which you will be able to see is historical data on completed projects. With £12 billion of capital expenditure this year, the South East should be getting £1 billion and Waterford should be getting £330 million. With the data available to me, I estimate the whole South East is just getting £330 million, a third of it is due. Again tarnished that, please do not tell me I am wrong or that I am incapable of understanding economic data. Show me the regional breakdown of the £12 billion in capital spending. Without the data, we just look continuously to the tin gruel of outputs in our hospitals, higher education, our public transport, our roads, our airports, our urban infrastructure. Why can ordinary people tarnished in this country not see where the money goes? Thanks very much Deputy for raising this important policy question. I agree that we should have better data on how money is spent and where it is spent. And that is something that I think we are very much aligned on. I also agree that governments do not have any money. The only money that governments have is the money that we take from people and business in the form of taxation. It is not our money, it is the people's money. That is why we have to spend it responsibly and that is why we have to account for it properly. And we do have strong accountability mechanisms. We publish accounts every year. Every government agency does. Every government department has an annual report. We have a public accounts committee chaired by the opposition with considerable powers. We have a constitutional office in the controller and auditor general who is responsible for auditing government spending. So I do think we have very strong accountability mechanisms in that regard. When it comes to capital spending, capital spending happens all over the country. I think sometimes when people do regional analyses as to how it is spent, they only focus on the big projects. I have seen some of the reports that you have mentioned. And often they only count projects of over 30 or 40 million. And I think that is a misleading analysis. Because of course in big cities you are going to have the bigger expensive projects. But in more rural areas you are going to have a lot of smaller projects. And I think any analysis that only counts investments above a certain threshold is only and can only ever be a partial analysis. One of the biggest investments underway at the moment, probably the biggest single investment actually underway at the moment in the state, is the National Broadband Plan, and that is heavily skewed towards regional areas, all regions, but particularly regions outside of Dublin, and areas that are most rural. And the more rural you go, the more that project costs. The last mile is the most expensive aspect of that project. And that is a project that is doing something that almost no other country in the world has done, bringing fibre to pretty much every home, farm and business in the country. And it is really important, in my mind, in future proofing and digital proofing our country. The targets for its implementation have been revised after COVID, but they are now being met. And we actually now know that the cost of that project is going to be less than it had originally been budgeted before. It will come in under 3 billion, and I think that is significant. And that is the biggest single capital project that is happening in Ireland at the moment. Metro, when it happens, will be bigger, but at the moment, that is the biggest one that is happening at the moment. And it is very much focused on regional development, very much focused on rural areas, but gets left out of a lot of these analyses, and I do not know why. Shannon? Thank you very much. Tarnish, it might interest you to know that I asked the Library and Research Services to conduct a review for me last year, and they told me they could not do it, because they did not have adequate transparency around data. So I think that is something the House needs to take up. Can I digress, just to share my frustration about capital downgrades. This morning we hear now about a downgrade of vascular surgical services at University Hospital Waterford. Coming on the back, I would say, of another steered report that has again ignored completely the population demographic standard, a rising population, the fact that we have a Model 4 interventional cardiology, oncology service, one of the busiest trauma units in the country, one of the busiest orthopedic services in the country, and yet again another steered report to send services up the road to Cork and take them out of Waterford. Now, Tarnish, a couple of days ago you referenced to the national media about difficulties in recruitment to the CAT lab in University Hospital Waterford, when in fact interview panels were not even put together and applications were not even made to be available for the jobs because they are not even advertised. So I think you have been getting briefings, and you know some time in the past you have suffered from getting failed briefings from South West Hospital Group, but I suppose what I really want to know is when will your government start to defend the South East Regional Model 4 with adequate finance, adequate capital, and when will you publish some funding strategy for University Hospital Waterford? Thanks very much Deputy, I'm not up to date or I haven't been briefed on the issue relating to vascular services in Waterford and I will check up on that. I got your email the other day in relation to the staffing of the second CAT lab in Waterford not having proceeded. I'm concerned about that too. I have spoken to Minister Donnelly about it, I've spoken to Senator Cummins about it as well, and I look into that further because it is important that we get on staffing the second CAT lab in Waterford. Staffing is difficult, there aren't many people in Ireland or the world who are currently looking for employment in the cardiology space, but we need to begin that recruitment and recruit as many staff as we can and extend the hours of that service, and that's something that you can be sure I'll follow up on. In relation to the health service generally, you know, the fact is investment in our health service is unprecedented, 22 billion euros this year, 50% more than when I was Health Minister not that long ago, more staff working in our health service than ever before, more doctors than ever before, a thousand more beds than two years ago, and significant investments in the south east as well, the Dunmore Wing and the second CAT lab just being part of that. Thank you very much.