Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)
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The Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage is 30% under profile. That is a considerable gap and the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform is not testing how it is spending. Officials are not sitting down with an engineer and asking what the projects are, which are behind and what is not getting delivered. At the end of the year, as happens at the end of every year in the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, it will get caught up somehow. I appreciate that 2021 was a year affected by Covid-19, but nearly all the Department's money was spent. Something like €116 million was surrendered, which is a very small proportion of the €5.1 billion the Department had to begin with. It all got spent at the end of the year because there was a rush to spend it. My contention is that this is not an acceptable way to manage this within the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage itself or for the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform as the overseer either. The latter needs to strengthen its expertise to be able to ask more probing questions.