Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I would first like to thank Deputy Shanahan and the Regional Group for developing and bringing forward this Bill. This is a vitally important area to which this House needs to give more attention.

Delivering capital projects is vital as it affects our ability to provide housing, healthcare, transport, connectivity and almost every aspect of the State. It can be the difference between a region developing and a region being left behind or lagging. It can be the difference between someone lying on a trolley or getting a hospital bed.

The Bill, as has been outlined, provides that each Minister shall report annually on large capital expenditures in their Department five years after the expenditure has occurred. Sinn Féin and I will support the Bill because providing basic detail on historical capital spending strengthens Oireachtas oversight of long-term capital spending trends. Whether the specific approach outlined in the Bill is the most appropriate means should be debated and discussed further. We support the general aim and intention of the Bill and believe this would be best assessed on Committee Stage.

Budget 2024 approved €12.6 billion for capital spending under the €165 billion National Development Plan 2021-2030, NDP. This needs to increase once an overdue review of the NDP is completed next year.

A common feature of major capital projects in the State is that initial budgets tend to escalate over time. This leads to overruns that can put pressure on the public finances and weaken the oversight of this House on budget and expenditure. In worst cases, it can require governments to resort to in-year cuts in spending areas or even the sudden delay or abandonment of certain investment projects. These challenges are not unique to Ireland and are a common feature internationally. If the State is to avoid further overruns and poor value-for-money outcomes in future, it will need to improve how public investment spending is governed. We need to mainstream reference class forecasting. It should also be noted that large capital projects do not usually go wrong but start wrong. Bad planning or a lack of planning mean that certain things were predetermined to go wrong from the beginning. In these cases, oversight, accountability and cost controls will have limited effect. We need to get planning right from the beginning. That does not mean endless reports. It means sincere and detailed planning that is examined and tested. Once a large capital project commences, every day until completion is expensive. Past recommendations from the International Monetary Fund, IMF, and Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, IFAC, suggested that the Department of public expenditure needs to take on more responsibility, particularly in the planning phases. We have seen the opposite under this Government.

This year, the Government announced reform of the public spending code that saw the Department remove some of the reforms that were only implemented in 2019 on the back of a review into the national children's hospital. The public spending code, which came into effect on 1 January 2020, was a step forward. It was the first time there was a systematic approach to project assurance, cost forecast, risk and procurement. In March this year, just over three years since the implementation of the spending code, the Minister announced the new reform plans. A core part of the reform proposal is to remove the public sector spending code and replace it with infrastructure guidelines. These guidelines have still not been published.

Under the 2019 spending code, the Department of public expenditure was required to undertake technical reviews of any major capital projects at three stages: the strategic assessment report, the preliminary business case and the final business case. The Department led technical reviews of both the preliminary and final business case. These were replaced in 2022 by a private consultant-led external assurance process. This year's reforms removed from the Department the last technical review of major capital projects at the strategic assessment phase. This means the Department will no longer be providing any technical reviews of major capital projects. The move towards an external assurance process represents the outsourcing of the assurance process previously conducted by the Government. It seems that the recommendation to outsource technical reviews to the private sector was recommended by private consultants in a 2021 report. Think about that. Private consultants are making recommendations from which other private consultants are going to benefit.

Reforms that were brought in because of the disaster of the national children's hospital have been dismantled before construction of the hospital has even been completed. The national investment office needs to be transformed into a real hub of expertise when it comes to large-scale capital projects. We also need to start building and to never stop. Austerity lost us years of development and a huge amount of institutional experience and expertise. We are paying the price for that now. Sometimes when I hear that the banks paid back whatever they paid back without real analysis of what has happened to this country because we nationalised the private debt of the banks, it really makes me angry on a ground level because we lost community development projects and other projects that were making good advances in tackling poverty and other issues. Those projects were all left to fall and we lost expertise within the Departments and all of that. The consequences of austerity have not been realised. We see the outrun of it in the different things that are now happening in our society which those projects and other things had been tackling in a good way. That was cut short because of the recklessness of the banks and the decisions made in that regard.

The reason we can still build roads and schools reasonably well is that we are always building them. We should never stop building social and affordable housing developments, rail lines, Luas lines and green infrastructure. That is how to drive down costs and speed up delivery.

I know from my county of Mayo how desperately we need capital investment. With the underfunding of both capital and health, I am concerned about two long-awaited projects in Mayo, which are the 75 community nursing beds in the Ballina district hospital and the 50 beds in the Belmullet Community Hospital announced as recently as September. The project in Ballina has been scheduled to move to design stage in 2024 and the project in Belmullet is scheduled to move to business case development. These projects cannot be cast into doubt by the Government's most recent budget announcements. The people of Mayo need reassurance that neither of these projects will be delayed.

As my colleagues have said, of the 234 regions across the EU, the north west of Ireland ranks 218th for infrastructure. That places the region in the bottom 7%, alongside some of the poorest regions in the EU. This Government has no plan or vision for the west and north west. This is evidenced by its unwillingness to commit to road and rail investment and by the lack of ambition for grid infrastructure and green energy. The region urgently needs road and rail infrastructure, including the N17 and the western rail corridor. For how much longer are we going to talk about the western rail corridor? We are in a climate crisis. We do not have the connectivity or transport required and yet there is dilly-dally and delay in respect of the western rail corridor. When I say the western rail corridor, I am talking about from Athenry to Claremorris and Claremorris to Collooney. That has to be started as quickly as possible. We need a grid capable of maximising the opportunities presented for renewable offshore energy along the western seaboard. We have the expertise, determination and local leadership to deliver on the promise of the Atlantic economic corridor. To do this, the west and north west need an infrastructure stimulus package. What is good for the north west is good for the State as a whole. Pressure needs to be taken off the urban areas.

This Bill has the potential to strengthen the role of this House, which is welcome. We need to take back responsibility. The Department of public expenditure needs to take back responsibility and do what is needed. We cannot have a situation whereby we continually contract everything out and abdicate responsibility. We have done that at local authority level, where we have the housing assistance payment, HAP, and the rental accommodation scheme, RAS. Those schemes are fine and serve a purpose. However, we have stopped building. We must stand still at some point and say we are responsible, the Government is responsible and elected representatives have a responsibility to make housing work for people here, not as a vehicle for people who are motivated by profit maximisation and making lots of money. There are things that can be done differently. This Bill contributes towards that and Sinn Féin and I support it. I look forward to Committee Stage where we can make this Bill even better to deliver for the whole country, the regions and the people in County Mayo.

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