Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 21 May 2025
Committee on Infrastructure and National Development Plan Delivery
Large-scale Capital Projects: Discussion
2:00 am
Mr. Ken Cleary:
To put it simply, we have, as I said, brought in the people and brought in our experts. They are being combined with a team of civil servants and we have four strands of our work programme to complete between now and July. As to what those strands are, the people coming in from these organisations are bringing with them a certain amount of institutional knowledge. They are the people who are working on the ground trying to deliver these projects, whether that be water pipelines or electricity substations, so there is a certain amount of institutional knowledge coming with them. We are going to combine that with identifying key stakeholders in all these sectors and then using our team of experts and civil servants to go out and interview these people to find out what in their opinion is causing these undue delays in the process. As we have limited resources and time available we will combine that with a public consultation we will launch in June to canvass wider views from the public. At the same time we are going to be looking at international best practice to see whether there are any countries that have successfully introduced reforms to their capital process that have accelerated things and what the best practice might be from organisations like the World Bank, the OECD and so on. Those are the four strands of work we will be doing on a very practical level over the next two months and then trying to draw all that together for a report for Government at the end of July that will say in our opinion, having gathered this information and evidence as widely as we could and condensed it all, here is what we think the biggest problems are. That is our work programme and as I said we are aiming to complete that by July.
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