Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 10 February 2022

Public Accounts Committee

2020 Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 29 - Environment, Climate and Communications
National Broadband Plan Expenditure and Related Matters

9:30 am

Mr. Mark Griffin:

On the latter question, the contract provides for a capped maximum subsidy of €2.6 billion, with a small amount of VAT of top of that, and it includes contingencies. As of now, we absolutely are of the view the project will be delivered within that. In fact, NBI is on record at the Oireachtas joint committee meeting last September saying there is no question but that it will be delivered within that time period.

I ask Mr. Mulligan to come in on what we are seeing in the construction sector market, including the cost of labour and materials. One of the mitigations NBI would say is quite effective is that it now has a broad panel of contractors to do work on the ground. It has pre-procured a lot of the materials and has put in place certain steps to deal with the potential for construction inflation, which we are seeing in other sectors because of demand generally, supply constraints on international markets and so on. As a general point, Mr. Mulligan might comment on whether we are aware of anything that is of significant concern in that regard at this point.

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