Emer Higgins (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for being here to share their insights. I will start with Mr. Doyle and Ms Donaghy. They summed up matters when they talked about uncertainty and how, this time one year ago, we could not have foreseen this level of uncertainty. It is encouraging that, against that backdrop, they are confident they will hit their targets for this year. I commend them and their teams on that. I appreciate that, next year and the year after, there will be further uncertainty. How do they feel we can help to provide them with the opportunity to meet those targets? In their opening statement, they called out the review of the capital advance leasing facility, CALF, in Housing for All being moved from the fourth quarter to the third quarter. That is welcome. What are they hoping or expecting to see when that comes forward? Do they think there will be much to help to set them up for success ahead of next year?

I was particularly interested in appendix 1 of the document provided by Ms Hegarty. She outlined a few recommendations and a number of actions that she feels can be taken which would have big impacts. One related to State-led master planning, both of housing developments and of infrastructure. Is she talking about strategic development zones? Does she see them naturally linking in with Project Ireland 2040 or does she feel that there is a disconnect? If we connect things better, would that have an impact? She also talks about the unbundling of projects. She is offering smaller tenders to potentially smaller builders. From the perspective of practicality or an administrative process, would that slow progress down? Would there be a risk? If there is not any administrative burden, having public contracts in small lots sounds feasible. What would Ms Hegarty categorise as small lots? She also called out mass procurements. Large builders obviously have much more capability to engage in that and therefore much more ability to build economies of scale into tendering and pricing operations. How can the Government help to deliver that opportunity to smaller providers? There are many questions there.