Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

We are discussing the national development plan. The Minister has previously attended this committee. When people asked about "X", "Y" and "Z" project before the national development plan was published - not that anyone would ever think in a very localised fashion in this committee - he told us that there will be a significant number of projects and spoke about what was almost a system of natural selection regarding the planning process. Therefore, it places a question mark over how much of the national development plan is for real. The witnesses talk about €1 billion for the early part of this decade. It is a considerable amount of money but it is not a huge amount of money. It is about what gets done.

Is there an element of whoever gets through the planning process gets sorted, to a degree, and that anybody else does not, bar, hopefully, the system being sorted out? Can I ask the witnesses for an opinion on that?