Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank both Ministers for giving the committee their time and for their openness. This is my first term as a member of this committee. I am struggling somewhat to understand how we do this oversight. The information is often produced in a language that suits the members of the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council but does not suit parliamentarians. We need to produce more common-language reports so what we can have better understanding of what is going on.

I ask both Ministers to consider having engagement with our committee prior to the publication of the summer economic statement so that the committee is better placed to consider that because it is usually over the summer. If we could have some engagement with the Ministers or their officials in May, it would help us in our work.

We talk about the well-being and the measurement of the broader living standards in Ireland. However, the north and western section of the country has been downgraded in its status to a region in transition, which means that our output and our economic derivative have fallen. How will that be tackled in budgets in coming years? This does not come from me but from the EU, which has written to Ireland about this. There is a significant difference and we should be positively discriminating towards the north and western region. I ask the Ministers for their comments on that.

I often say that the biggest problem we have with budgets is looking at what the outcomes are. We set the budget and we get reports, but we do not actually see how the budget works. For instance, I have tried to elicit information from different Departments about how their capital projects are performing and if they are overrunning. They are struggling to come up with the information. It beggars belief that we are spending billions of euro on capital projects and we do not have readily to hand how each project performs, and if we have overruns why we have them and whether we should take corrective action. There are many strategic issues we have not taken into account when we are spending billions of euro. Nobody, apart from officials from the OPW, has come back to me how they are performing on their capital spend and whether their final accounts are exceeding their tenders. It is a very simple process. I ask the Ministers to comment on those matters.