Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

I am disappointed there will not be a new national development plan that would start to prioritise projects in a more coherent way. If the Minister is so happy with the delegated authority he is giving to Departments, will he assure the House that in all the many cases we have seen, these Departments have complied in every respect with his guidelines? For example, in the Kilkenny drainage project we saw an original quote of €13 million rise at design review stage to €24 million. At tender stage it rose to €35 million and on completion it cost €48 million. At each stage it appears the Minister gave his approval. I wonder if the re-evaluations he requires were done.

The Luas project, which was to have been connected and completed in four years at a cost of €450 million, ended up disconnected, taking eight years and costing €800 million. Is the Minister satisfied that these projects are applying the rules set by his Department? In the case of 19 roads projects we found that the costs rose by more than 80%, and the cost overruns for the overall roads programme amounted to nearly €10 billion. I do not share the Minister's assurances that the Departments running these schemes have the capacity to deliver on time and on budget.

It is disheartening to hear that the Minister is not taking serious initiatives to properly prioritise programmes or properly control costs, or to audit the evaluations being delivered. Has he rejected the ESRI proposal for a unit to be set up in the Department to audit these evaluations? Has he rejected the ESRI assessment that the good habits learned when we had EU funds have largely been forgotten within Departments in terms of evaluation cost control and the delivery of results?

The Minister needs to reassess his reply and introduce a system in which the public can have greater confidence, which will deliver value from what he proposes, involving a spend of €60 billion, a huge amount of money, over the next five or six years. If things go wrong, we will have lost a great opportunity.

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