Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Minister of State said a lot there. I will give him some facts. Right now, the construction industry is in free fall. Contractors are not going to price public works contracts as they stand at the moment. It is a particular risk in the engineering contracting. The Minister of State, Deputy O'Donovan, is here. This also affects flood relief schemes, where there is an enormous risk in taking on one of these projects. Civil engineering contractors will not take them on because they cannot price the risk and the risk is not seen. A lot of the work is in water and rivers and cannot be seen. I have tried to elicit this information from various Departments.

Since the contracts were introduced, what has the performance been in terms of delivery on time, the cost and the overruns? There is also the cost of litigation, arbitration and the claims environment that now exists within the construction industry. How is that being costed into each project? I saw a project from the HSE that was 60% over the tender price. Some of that was probably due to additional works but a lot of it was contractual claims. The head of one contracting authority told me last week that before a project starts, the first thing that goes on site is a Portakabin and into that go quantity surveyors who start the claims process against the contracting authority. We have an adversarial industry and we need to correct that as a matter of urgency.

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