John Clendennen (Offaly, Fine Gael)

I thank the Chair and wish him well in his role. This is an extremely important committee considering the juncture we are at as a country with a strong economy, continuing population growth, ongoing foreign direct investment and our SME sector. There are many challenges, but they are certainly presenting an opportunity. We must unlock it now by engaging with all the relevant stakeholders, whether in planning, roads, rail, energy, power, water, waste or housing. They all have a part to play. A thematic sense may emerge from the national development plan as it unfolds over the course of the summer. We will need to focus on that and see how we can progress all the different initiatives that we need to. It cannot just be on a constituency level. We are all going to have our own individual priorities, but there is also a national element and an aspect of balanced regional development. We must ensure we are approaching this endeavour in a strategic way that best serves the entire country.

If you talk to the general public today, you will be told that when they hear about plans, such as a hospice in my county about which four front-page headlines have been written in the past eight weeks as to whether it will be built, their general message is to just get on and bloody build it. We must reduce those obstacles and barriers that are preventing key infrastructure and the deliverables that are required in order to make our country a better place in which to live, work, raise a family and invest. We have to, in some way, determine how we can actually measure that for our betterment.

I have talked about the consultation piece and the media commentary that occurs. With regard to projects in my county, libraries are taking almost ten years to be built. You have to really consider how it takes ten years to build a library. Projects like a link road or a primary care centre should literally just be approved and built, but they continuously bounce around the Houses. While eventually we get there, it is two, three, four or five years later. We need to make it more seamless.

Previous speakers have mentioned inviting all of the different representative bodies before the committee. To use the example of building a house, if you engage with a contractor and no one else, when things go wrong, you start calling in the plumber, the electrician and carpenter and you get all of them around the table together to ask whether the electrician is blaming the carpenter or the plumber in order to find out what is going on. A bit of that must happen in this regard. Rather than inviting them all in individually - I am not saying they are going to blame each other, but given their outlook they will say they want more funding when they are asked why they are not doing more to deliver and so forth - we must recognise that there is a collective role in this regard. With a few more seats, we can have a lot of the stakeholders coming in together to get heads around the table together rather than them coming in individually week after week. I fully appreciate and accept the Cathaoirleach’s proposals for the first couple of weeks. We need them to get up and running. As this evolves and as we see where we are going, it is going to require all of those key stakeholders to come around the table together and deliver. I look forward to working with the Cathaoirleach and all of the committee members here in delivering for the best interests of our constituencies and the country as a whole.