Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Minister spoke about capital expenditure and he said that it has increased to €1 billion, that he is looking at the baseline and that he will be looking at other capital expenditure to stimulate the economy. One of the problems we have with capital expenditure is that the timeline to deliver projects is far too long. If one decided tomorrow morning to build a housing scheme, it would be three years before there would be anything on the ground. What can be done to stimulate that process and to remove some of the procurement hurdles to make capital expenditure on projects that need to be delivered attainable within a short timeframe? The Minister said that he recognises that construction industry commercial activity will be slowing down because of the uncertainty. The Government could pick up on this opportunity to have public works done. When reading a report on Revised Estimates I noted that last year the OPW got only two of six projects off the ground, which is one third of what should have been done. This is a fault of the system, not the OPW. Will the Minister undertake to review how the Office of Public Procurement is doing its business such that we can accelerate the benefit of the budget for capital expenditure see the results of it quicker?