Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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In the lifetime of this Government, by some way the most disruptive issue to us delivering our capital projects has been the impact of cost-price inflation. It has meant the costs for certain projects, through nobody's fault, have moved significantly ahead of what they would have been expected to be because the costs of concrete, steel, wood and energy have all changed over the past two years in particular. By some way, therefore, I would highlight that as the biggest challenge we have faced.

Because this challenge has come largely from beyond our shores, the first step we have taken to address it is that changes have been made to the contracts for certain capital works to allow the risk in respect of those contracts to be better shared between the State and those who are involved in building the projects, because we recognise that inflation has had a big impact on them. Second, we have made changes to the level of our capital budgets whereby, in many cases, we have had to allocate additional money to projects simply because they are costing more, given that the cost of building them has increased due to inflation. That is the single biggest issue we have had to deal with.