Mr. Aidan Sweeney:

I might take the first question and then Mr. Brady will take the second. The key thing for us on the procurement side is to recognise that the focus of infrastructure delivery and the Government's accelerating infrastructure task force is not just on the planning system. It is right through the whole delivery lifecycle. Public procurement is one of those key areas. The specific chart the Cathaoirleach was talking shows just the time to make a decision. That is from when bids are submitted until the decision to award them. It takes three times longer than is the case in the best performing countries. We highlighted that figure, which came from the European Court of Auditors in a 2023 procurement study. The issue for us is that we want the public procurement market and the NDP pipeline to be as attractive as possible for bidders for those contracts and to allow the value chains and supply chains to scale up.

Our key thing is partly that we had decisions that were not awarded simply because the approval process was pulled and the budget was not approved at the first stage. In that length of time, the decision-making has impacted on the ability and appetite to bid.