Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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I thank the Deputy for his question and for his kind comments earlier on.

I will talk about business cases first and maybe broaden it out to the public spending code and how these issues are dealt with. The Deputy is correct that it is difficult in a business case to place an economic value on something that is intrinsically social or is a real proper public good. The way I have seen this dealt with in our business cases - I saw one only yesterday on this topic - is the business case carries out an analysis of those economic factors that we are familiar with that are easy to quantify but, accompanying that, I see increasingly text and recognition from my Department and from other Departments stating the economic benefits and the other issues that we should consider the value of, which are difficult to quantify. I see that happening on quite a broad basis now.

In my experience of public spending codes, what they allow you to do is evaluate inside the parameters of a Department what is the best use of the money that is available to it. It rarely gets to the place of evaluating the public spending benefit of a hospital versus a metro but what it would do for the Department of Transport to say, out of all of the different options it has, what are the best projects and, because the Department of Transport would have its own ways of evaluating, for example, the benefits of reduced commuting time and the benefit of the impact of something on road use, it enables one to make a choice between existing projects of the same kind. Then, most of the time, the framework for non-economic benefits should be roughly the same.

I see this recognised in public spending code decisions. In relation to the national development plan, NDP, there is a whole section in the national development that is devoted to green and climate-friendly investment. It is one of the key strategic areas of the NDP. I happen to think there are few projects in there that do not make sense to do economically but, of course, by grouping green projects together, it means that we recognise the non-quantifiable benefit in a more easy and accessible way.

It is an important issue that there is a high level of awareness of now in making decisions on public spending projects.