Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail)
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We have received apologies from Deputy Cronin. I advise members of the constitutional requirement that they must be physically present within the confines of the Leinster House complex in order to participate in public meetings. Private meetings are a different matter. I also remind them of the long-standing parliamentary practice that they should not criticise or make charges against any person or entity by name or in such a way as to make him, her or it identifiable, or otherwise engage in speech that might be regarded as damaging to the good name of a person or entity. Therefore, if their statements are potentially defamatory in relation to an identifiable person or entity, they will be directed to discontinue their remarks. It is imperative that they comply with such a direction, if it arises.

The first item on the agenda is the minutes of the last meeting. They have been circulated. Are they agreed? Agreed.

We move to correspondence. This is the second item on the agenda. The first item of correspondence is No. 012. It is an email from the Irish Academy of Engineering. It is a recent response to a consultation by the Department on barriers to infrastructural delivery. The document also provides links to academy reports on energy and infrastructure. It offers its support for the committee's work. It sent this to the Department and sent us a copy of the same submission. I suggest we note and publish it. That is agreed.

The next item of correspondence is an email on behalf of the Czech ambassador, Pavel Vošalík. It notes that a committee of the Senate of the Parliament of the Czech Republic will visit Ireland in the autumn. The Senate Committee on National Economy, Agriculture and Transport will visit the Houses of the Oireachtas on the days between 15 and 20 September and has requested to meet the members of our committee. In advance of this, it has requested a meeting with the clerk to discuss the matter further. Do members agree the clerk should meet with the representative of or assistant to the ambassador? I suggest we have an informal meeting with them. It can be a joint meeting with the Department of agriculture, but not a formal meeting. I say that because that is the week the Dáil is back and we are not back until the Wednesday. Then on the Thursday some Members of the Oireachtas might be interested in attending a little ploughing match taking place all that week. I would not like to have a formal meeting on the Thursday, taking into account the quorum. I suggest an informal meeting so some members can attend. That is the offer we will make to them. That is agreed.

No. 023 is an email from the Department of Public Expenditure, Infrastructure, Public Service Reform and Digitalisation providing further information sought at our meeting on 21 May. They were the first people in. The correspondence sets out the information requested during our meeting with the Department, including information on the two public consultations and engagement with the public. There are two documents detailing the existing list of projects over €200 million contained in the Project Ireland 2040 tracker and a note from the Department of Transport regarding the N24 and N25 roads. One of our members requested information on that roads situation and that is in that document. The N24 and N25 are listed under minor projects. There is a note on the N24 and N25, which is Waterford to Cahir, Waterford to Glenmore and Cahir to Limerick, and the allocation. Also included are the N11-N25 Oilgate to Rosslare and the N25 Midleton to Youghal. There was a €700,000 allocation.

The information is there on the issues specified but I have an issue with the general information provided by the Department of Public Expenditure, Infrastructure, Public Service Reform and Digitalisation in the other section of the reply. We asked when the major projects currently in the system were first initiated or considered and we requested the completion date. All the Department has given us are the dates of construction and completion. Sometimes planning and discussion could have been going on for a decade. I am sending this schedule back and asking when the first piece of paper arrived in the Department on a particular project and when it was completed. The schedule states that it concerns projects over €200 million which have not gone to construction. They include MetroLink, DART and the M20 Cork to Limerick. Many are still subject to appraisal. They have it broken down by Department. Health is there. The national maternity hospital is subject to appraisal. On the water side, it has the greater Dublin drainage scheme. The start date is 2028. That must be the construction start date. That is a long time in the pipeline, if you will pardon the pun. Energy, housing, tourism and flood relief projects are also there. I want the Department to give us the date on which the matter first came to the Government's attention for consideration. Then it moves on to completed projects and talks about O'Devaney Gardens' completion date. It says the start date was in 2023. That project has been around as long as I have, so that date must refer to construction.

Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)
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The plan for flood defences in Midleton was promised in 2017. The planning permission is not even written yet. We need to know the whole timescale, not just for construction.

Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail)
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Absolutely. I propose to return this correspondence and ask for a breakdown of when they were considered and when they went to tender, planning and construction. Some will not be at that stage yet. For those that are under way, we want to know how long it has taken. If we are looking at delivery of the next national development plan, we need to know. The best way to know what the system can do is by knowing what it has been doing up to now and how long projects have taken. I am returning the schedule in its entirety through the secretariat. If they have to communicate, they can come back to me to ask precisely what we are looking for.

Another thing in the reply is not good enough either, though I understand it to a point. MetroLink seems to have only a couple of categories of expenditure: €200 million to €500 million; €500 million to €1 billion; and over €1 billion. It just tells us a MetroLink project is over €1 billion; that could be €2 billion, €10 billion or €17 billion. I will ask the Department to provide the cost estimates including a category of, let us say, over €10 billion because those are the really big ones. A range as big as €1 billion to €5 billion is not commercially sensitive. We need to know which are the big projects of well over €1 billion. I will ask for anything over €10 billion. Is that agreed? Agreed.

No. 024 is an email from the Joint Committee on Disability Matters. The Cathaoirleach, Deputy Quinlivan, requests committees actively seek to engage with persons with disabilities during committee proceedings and notes it is especially important as committees are preparing their work programmes and schedules for 2025. We all agree with that completely. Especially with infrastructure, disability matters. Services for people with disability will have to be worked into all the major capital projects we are talking about. We will bear it in mind. I propose we forward that correspondence directly to the Department of Public Expenditure, Infrastructure, Public Service Reform and Digitalisation so all projects are considered by it and not just at committee level.

We will note and publish that letter and then we note and publish the earlier response we received from the Department of public expenditure and reform on the matters just discussed about the scale and timescale of the projects. We will get further information back.

The next item of correspondence is a briefing note from the committee's policy adviser on the recent accelerating infrastructure consultation held on Wednesday, 18 June 2025. This gives us an overall view of the accelerating infrastructure consultation. The event was conducted as part of a broader public consultation. It sought input from public stakeholders on how the provision of infrastructure may be accelerated. This meeting was held in Athlone last week. The policy adviser, on behalf of the committee, attended and there is a brief note, Accelerating Infrastructure, Athlone, Westmeath, dated 18 June, which our committee secretariat prepared as a summary of that meeting. There were approximately 60 people at the meeting. The Irish Academy of Engineering, health services, Transport Infrastructure Ireland, the Northern and Western Regional Assembly and Southern Regional Assembly attended and various matters were discussed. It is an information note that was prepared for the committee, a representative having formally attended. I was invited to attend, as Chair, but the secretariat attended. It was an afternoon event held in Athlone. As we are in public session, the committee secretariat cannot speak but they have provided a good information note. The committee is tracking what is going on with that matter. We will note and publish that as well so it will be available to the public.

As per our previous meeting, we did not have a clock in operation and we agreed members would be allocated a six-minute speaking slot. There can be a second round of speakers, but just so everyone is not waiting for too long, it will be a six-minute slot. That is for questions and answers so it is very tight when answers are added in. The plan is to have the time shown on the screen today. I am not sure if the IT is working. If it is working, the time will be on the screen and people will see how much time they have left. If it is not working, we will keep as close an eye on the time as possible, and I hope it will work the next day if not today.

Another item I want to mention is that we indicated at the previous meeting that we want to produce a report on our first series of meetings to date before we break for the summer because we want to see a bit of action and not just sit back until the autumn. I accept there will not be firm conclusions at this stage because we will only have had initial meetings, but we will tease out the key information and observations we have going forward and it is good to put even that on the record. So far, we have held a number of meetings and, over the next couple of weeks, the committee will meet representatives of An Coimisiún Pleanála, formerly An Bord Pleanála, and the Office of the Planning Regulator on 2 July. The meeting will not be about how they make their decisions but timescales, priorities and delays. The following week, on 9 July, the committee will meet representatives of the Courts Service for exactly the same purpose. Judicial reviews can go on forever, as it seems to some people, and some projects just get abandoned because of the time they take, so the meetings will be about the efficiency and timescales of these organisations. On 16 July, the committee will meet representatives of the Environmental Protection Agency.

The committee secretariat has been working on summarising the meetings so far and the committee will have a meeting next Thursday. For that meeting it is planned to have a draft report of what has been done with a view to members making observations by close of business the following Monday. This will not be an extensive report. I believe long reports get left on the shelf and short reports get read. That is my style. There will be an opportunity at a meeting next week to take on board any amendments people want to make to the draft report. It was agreed that we sign off on the report at our meeting on 9 July and launch it formally on the Plinth or the audiovisual room or wherever on Thursday, 10 July. I think we need to show a bit of urgency on the matter. Is that agreed all round? Agreed. If members have observations on the draft report, send them to the secretariat in the five days between the meetings - I know they include a weekend. I would like to show some-----

Eileen Flynn (Independent)
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What is the focus of the report and why are we doing a report? This is only one of the first public meetings of the committee. I just ask out of curiosity.

Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail)
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We looked at the structure of the report so far. There will be a formal introduction. The report will be a summary of the key points from the groups we have met so far and is to show, at the end of this Dáil year, the work the committee has done. We will have done a summary and we will have clear observations on it but there will not be final conclusions because it is too early to draw any absolute conclusions. The first-----

Eileen Flynn (Independent)
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My question is not a challenge; it is only for us, as a committee. When we launch the report, will it contain recommendations or will it just be a summary of the groups we have brought in?

Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail)
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Exactly that. The report will contain a summary of the groups we have met: the Department of public expenditure, Uisce Éireann, transport infrastructure projects - we had transport groups in - and IBEC. They will be contained in the report. We will not have firm conclusions but will have key what I would call observations - what the committee has observed so far.

Eileen Flynn (Independent)
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Okay.

Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail)
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There will not be definite conclusions. It would be premature to draw conclusions after a few meetings. We will have clear expressions of our views, such as the letter we are sending back to the Department of public expenditure on the information it provided, but there will not be formal conclusions because it is a first report.

Eileen Flynn (Independent)
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Would you call it an interim report?

Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail)
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Yes, it will be an interim report. It will not be a final report.

Eileen Flynn (Independent)
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Again, I am not challenging this. I am just making sure we are not all looking like eejits landing a report.

Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail)
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No, I expect there will be interest in the report because we had bodies such as Uisce Éireann, Transport Infrastructure Ireland and the National Transport Authority in, so a lot of the report will be about what they are saying and they will have highlighted some of the difficulties. This is what the committee wants to make observations on.

Eileen Flynn (Independent)
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Brilliant. I have to leave to vote. I thank the Chair.

Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)
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The committee asked the Department of Transport representatives to provide a comparative analysis of regulation in other jurisdictions and they said they would. It would be great to get that back before the report is complete. Regulations are one of the big challenges we have in this country, and planning.

Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail)
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We chased this up this morning and I have been told it is on the way.

Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)
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That is great.

Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail)
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They are the type of issues that will be contained in the report. I think it would be remiss of the committee to disappear. As I said at the beginning, when this new committee was set up, "delivery" was the most important word in our title. It is not just about talk, it is about delivery, and we need to show a bit of urgency by having an interim report.

Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)
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To summarise what we have learned, basically.

Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail)
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Exactly.

John Clendennen (Offaly, Fine Gael)
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I will pick up on that point. There were a number of requests made by the committee for formal documents, reports or actions. The Chair spoke about the urgency that is needed of the committee. As a symbol of what the committee means in terms of our intentions and urgency, we should set a deadline of a week, that if we meet on Wednesday, we meet on the following Wednesday. Here we are now and the witnesses from last week have not delivered. It reflects everything we are talking about on a larger scale. In essence, to show the level of intention and urgency, we have to set our deadlines that if we meet this Wednesday and make a request for a formal action, it should be delivered upon before we meet the following week. If that cannot be delivered, where are we going in terms of the delivery of large-scale infrastructure projects?

Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail)
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It is five weeks since we had our first meeting and we asked the then Department of public expenditure, national development plan delivery and reform for a series of information items and we have really only received the first batch of them after a month. I say publicly on the committee's behalf that all of the organisations' responses to requests for information are a disgrace.

John Clendennen (Offaly, Fine Gael)
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Absolutely.

Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail)
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How can a national development plan and key projects be delivered if they cannot even respond to an Oireachtas committee request for straightforward information? We said the last day, and I will put it on the record, that we would give every organisation a fortnight to respond because sometimes the list of questions submitted is even longer than what was asked at the meeting. I said a fortnight, and if they could give us 90% of the information, give the 90% with the 10% to follow.

However, it looks as if they are waiting until they have 100% of the information before we get anything. The pace at which responses have been given to this committee in public session by everybody who has been before us has been a disgrace. It is unacceptable.

John Clendennen (Offaly, Fine Gael)
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We find ourselves in a situation where perfection is getting in the way of progress and, as a result, we are delivering nothing.

Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail)
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Can we stick with the deadline of a fortnight? Those representatives could be going off for two busy days off site or something. A fortnight is reasonable. If there is an element they cannot answer, I ask them to send a note to the committee. It will take an extra five days or something like that. I have been around other committees in the past. I put on the record again that the performance of all those groups has been a disgrace. I use that word carefully but it is a factual description.

John Clendennen (Offaly, Fine Gael)
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The lack of urgency is seriously telling.

Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail)
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Absolutely. I am going even stronger than what the Deputy has said. I appreciate that. We will suspend for a moment while our guests from IBEC take their seats.