Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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I thank the Deputy for his points. I will just deal with the expenditure matters he covered and the Minister for Finance will address some of the broader economic issues he touched on.

From a spending point of view, the Government agreed to a number of proposals I brought to Cabinet a few weeks ago trying to make progress on some of the matters he referred to. In particular, we have changed the threshold at which the valuation and the cost-benefit analysis work takes place. We have increased the threshold on that so we are focusing more of our work on projects that have a higher value. It was originally set at €100 million but with inflation, the number of projects that have crossed that €100 million threshold has increased. We have now moved the threshold to €200 million. For projects that are below €200 million we have allowed Departments to make more of the decisions themselves on those projects, as opposed to the very high level of evaluation that goes on for the larger projects. We have done this because at a time of high inflation, as the Deputy said, for every month that goes by, the cost of a project is going up while our expenditure ceilings are, by and large, fixed.

The second change that has happened is to try to give Departments themselves more of the responsibility in this regard. They now need to come to us to confirm that the public spending code has been adhered to and confirmed. We have put more of the responsibility with Accounting Officers in Departments to do this, and we have also decreased the number of decision points on some projects from five to three.