Mr. Aidan Sweeney:

The key thing is that the global infrastructure marketplace is highly mobile. For Ireland, we tend to be with the UK, which has gone to the Middle East to chase big projects. A lot of those are Irish-led. We have been talking to a number of different companies that are looking at investing in Ireland to deliver a lot of the projects. They may come in for the metro but they will look at social housing and all the other opportunities there. What they want is a consistent pipeline with the NDP that is certain that these projects will be awarded and delivered. As regards the steps now with the infrastructure division and the accelerating infrastructure, these are positive soundings out there to tackle some of these barriers. We want to see what the details are with those.

As regards the issues about particular priorities around digital infrastructure and the telcos and all those issues the Deputy referred to, we are making our submission to the national development plan tomorrow and we will happily circulate it to the committee following that. We are also making detailed recommendations on the accelerating infrastructure task force the following week, for 4 July. Those will identify the barriers to delivery across different areas and the solutions. We are talking about AI and the digital infrastructure. We are thinking about the fact that the guidelines for phone masts from 1996 drastically need to be updated because we cannot roll out next-generation technologies on guidelines that were released 30 years ago.

It is the same on some of the forestry guidelines and things like that. We talk about the resilience with the recent storm and the different issues like that. We have a couple of different examples even on those areas as to where we see that small tweaks can help with the roll-out and the resilience the Deputy mentioned. A couple of other areas will be in our NDP submission as well.