Brian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I will jump in on this. Something that has been troubling me in recent weeks is the pseudo-science of cost-benefit analyses. We use this methodology when we invest public money in anything and for good reason. We want to figure out whether it makes sense and have to be careful about how we invest public money. Does Dr. O'Hagan-Luff have anything to say about how good cost-benefit analysis is at capturing the true values and the true costs, besides the immediate and direct ones? We were hoping to have officials from the Department of Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform before the committee in the second part of this session but they were not able to attend. It is perhaps more a question for them, but does Dr. O'Hagan-Luff have anything to say about cost-benefit analyses and - I am inclined to say - pseudo-science? It is regrettable that we make these huge decisions on spending public money on something and if we look at the it retrospectively five or ten years later, whether an investment was made, we generally find that the wrong decision was made.