Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

For example, most of what happened under the framework of commitments we have under the Lansdowne Road agreement, alongside the wage increases that are due to our public servants, tend to be associated with productivity changes as well. We now have an organisation of economists within my Department whose job it is to look at our capital expenditure to ensure it is meeting the requirements we have for it and that we are putting it into the forms of infrastructure that will get us the best bang for our buck.

More broadly, we must measure output from all areas of current expenditure. For example, when we meet to discuss where we are with health expenditure, we look at where we are with activity levels in our acute hospital group. We look at how many patients have been seen, how many operations have been performed and all of that. In so many different areas, we are seeing that our public servants have done more with less, with activity levels going up in our hospitals. More is happening in primary schools across a period when teachers had fewer resources than they did a decade ago.