Ms Baibre Nic Aongusa:

The reason for the underspend in the capital programme is that our capital programme includes several major capital projects which are all going to come to fruition at the same time and all of them are at the early stage in their lifecycles. These include the children's hospital, the Central Mental Hospital, the move of the National Maternity Hospital to St. Vincent's and the national plan for radiation oncology. For various reasons those big projects have not proceeded as quickly as expected and that gives rise to the money not being spent.

The procurement of design teams and contractors is taking longer than it used to because of the particular challenges in the industry at the time. For example in one capital project in the Department's Vote a number of companies went into liquidation and the contracts had to be re-tendered. Those are the challenges we face. When it became clear during the year that we would have a surplus the HSE has tendered for minor capital works and equipment which could be realistically completed by year end and we did a big push for an equipment replacement programme and a flexible scope replacement programme and expenditure in October and November was increased significantly. Despite that we had a surplus. It will not continue in other years because these large projects are expected to use up all the capital programme funding in future years.