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

It is the infrastructure, climate and nature fund and most of the climate bit has been clearly indicated towards the retrofitting of public buildings, expanding anaerobic digestion, rolling out district heating and increasing support for solar panels in various sectors and so on. I could go on. The same is true of the nature part of the fund. The climate and nature bit is certainly allocated, or at least in my mind it is clearly designated as to where it is going to go.

The infrastructure part is an issue we should and will look at. It has been designed such that there will not be a repeat of what happened in the past, such as when we pulled the metro in 2012. In hindsight, we should not have done that.

The IMF was correct that in our response to the financial crisis, we should not have cut capital as much as we did. We are suffering infrastructure shortfalls in housing, energy, transport and water because of that. We do not want to make the same mistake again, which is the case I will be making to officials in the Department of public expenditure and reform. They will rightly come back and ask us to show them the project pipeline, and we do need to set that out. There is a lot of debate about the Planning and Development Bill, in which the Acting Chair of this committee will be centrally involved. To my mind, that is key.

I will go back in time. I was involved with the metro. We nearly had it built. We were so close to getting it built in 2008 or 2009. There is only one reason it was not contracted and built. We could have built it for one third of the price we are going to have to pay for it now, and it had EIB funding. Planning issues in north Dublin at the time, whether archaeological or otherwise, delayed us for two years, which meant we missed the window. We are not going to let that happen again.