Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

The answer is in the point the Deputy makes. It is projects of scale. The departmental budget is scaling up. It has seen dramatic year-on-year increases. It has almost doubled the last three years. I mentioned a figure earlier. On the timelines, if you focus on a particular calendar year, there will be variations and some projects will overspend and others underspend. Take retrofitting, as I said earlier, the overall spend is something like one third of a billion euro and €27 million is about 7% or 8%. It is largely a timing issue. The money will be spent. The projects are there but they are just part of a pipeline where they are coming through. Similarly, waste management is probably the second largest example. There are often very large remediation projects that are somewhat lumpy in basis, such as to remedy historic landfill sites. Many of our projects are subject to permitting, planning and regulatory approval. Time lines are not exact and it does not all fit within a yearly structure. There is no lack of ambition to deliver on the various different programmes. It is similarly the case with just transition, to deal with some of the areas the Deputy mentioned. There was a €12 million Estimate spend and of that, there was €3 million where we found that individual projects could not proceed. I am talking about a large number of projects for which there may have been difficulty getting matching funding, European approval or a variety of other technical reasons. Yes, you would prefer to spend every single penny of every budget but the reality is that a €1 billion programme will have underspends and overspends. What we are doing today is balancing between the two. Next year, it could well come back the other way where demand-led programmes in the energy side exceed what we are doing. On both broadband and energy, which are the two key areas in term of the viring across of the transfer of funds, both are ahead of target so we are not falling back on that. They are ahead of target in terms of delivery of retrofits. We are not falling back on that. It is just ahead of target in terms of delivery of retrofits. When I talk to the industry, with the new low-cost loans coming in in February, we are expecting further growth here. That is the underlying trend.