Ossian Smyth (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I will start with Deputy Durkan. Certainly, there are some types of investment that are deflationary, such as providing more housing for example.

The delivery of the projects can help reduce inflation. There is a wide variety of inflationary effects depending on what you are investing in, and how much labour is involved is a part of it. That is the analysis we are looking at.

I think Deputy Durkan referred to what our previous Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, called the swans and the snails interrupting infrastructure projects. In fact, we are looking at a much broader range of things, the public spending code and other constraints among them.

To turn to Deputy O’Sullivan, we changed our inflationary system to share the risk between the contractor and the person ordering the work. The reason for that is certain critical projects were likely to be unprofitable, get cancelled and have to go out for re-tender. We would end up paying more overall. Risk-sharing was a correct move. If the Deputy has a specific project we wants information on, he can contact me or if he wants statistics, he can contact my office.

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