Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The whole purpose of category 2 funding is to help people to prepare projects for category 1 funding, which is for big multimillion euro projects. The cost of construction has gone up. We employ a quantity surveyor as part of the assessment, which is important to ensure the costs and contingencies have been included by the lead party for the project. In line with best practice in project management, all applicants to the fund are asked to put in a contingency budget at a level appropriate for the type of project being undertaken. A carefully calculated contingency budget will meet many of the challenges people face in terms of cost overruns.

Notwithstanding this, it is open to project lead parties to make a case to the Department for additional funding if the cost of an approved project significantly increases after the procurement process is completed. Many leaders have said to me that after they went to procurement, the project ended up costing a lot more than they thought it would. If that is the case, they can make a detailed justification as to why they need more money. We certainly are not in the business of holding people back from developing good projects for their communities.

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