Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Yesterday, the Taoiseach came out with another of his increasingly desperate attack lines, with the bizarre claim that we, on the Opposition side, are calling for the re-profiling of capital projects and to delay them. His memory is, again, very selective. The statement that capital projects would be re-profiled was made by his Government. For example, on 4 April, the Minister for Finance announced that he had decided to re-profile money allocated to Project Ireland 2040, the new marketing name for the national development plan, NDP. One of the direct cuts involved in this was a €24 million reduction in funding for repairs and renovation projects in the health sector this year. I am looking for some honesty about the timing of projects on which the Government has spent millions of euro in public money marketing to national and local audiences. When the now inevitable video with drone shots of the Cliffs of Moher was published at the start of this marketing campaign, we were told there would be absolute transparency about funding and timing. Yet, when we seek clarity following billions of euro in overruns, the Taoiseach comes out with this nonsense that we are seeking cutbacks.

It takes a special form of almost childish brazenness to sign a contract rapidly to make a project irreversible and then attack others for not proposing to incur massive costs for the State by reversing it. This appears to be the core Fine Gael strategy now, so we will all have to get used to it. The Government not only wants to pretend that it is funding projects, which will not be planned or funded for many years; it wants to deny the impact of overruns. It should be noted by the House that each of the major overruns has been hidden from the public until the last moment. The Taoiseach accused us of conspiracy theories about broadband and the children's hospital when we said the cost in each case would be what it has turned out to be.

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