Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Exactly. A cost of €58 million to build a school, rather than have the State do it directly, sounds like a hell of a lot to me. Furthermore, we are now discovering that because the traffic going through the Limerick tunnel is not as heavy as was originally envisioned, the State will have to fork out €200 million to make up the shortfall.

In conclusion, the other side will fire back by asking how we are supposed to meet the upfront capital costs to do it if we carry out these projects ourselves. They will contend that PPPs allow us to leverage money from the private sector and so on. This is where the madness of the application of the fiscal rules to capital expenditure comes in. That is something that even some of the Government's people have acknowledged. It is madness for the fiscal rules to treat vital capital infrastructure spending in the same way as current spending where our debt is concerned. Infrastructure spending or capital investment spending actually creates an asset for the State, and in many cases creates revenue streams that will more than cover the costs of projects over the long term. That should not be treated in the same way as current expenditure.

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