Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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If I were to highlight two reforms I believe are making a difference, the first is the way in which we have changed the process with regard to the public spending code. We have increased the threshold above which a further level of work needs to be done in evaluating the business case and where additional processes need to be triggered because the cost of the project is high. We have changed the threshold of that, allowing more projects below a value of €200 million to move forward with more speed.

An additional change we have made, which the construction sector raises often with me, is the work we have done in building information management. We are trying to bring more of the information that is needed to deliver and build complex projects. It is available digitally and is shared in real time with everybody who is involved in delivering the project.

Those are reforms from different ends of how we spend the country's money, but I believe they are having an impact. If I were to point to the biggest top-line difference I can see in capital spending this year versus that of previous years of the Government, it is that in the first couple of years of the Government's term we were not able to spend our full capital budgets, which was due to the pandemic. Even after the pandemic had lifted, however, some Departments still had difficulty spending their full capital budgets. For the past two years, that has been a thing of the past, as is again the case for this year. If I were to say whether this is having a benefit, I would say it definitely is and I would point to new school buildings, the roll-out of the national broadband plan and extensions to certain hospitals as the most tangible examples of the difference it has made.