Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)
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52. To ask the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform if levels of public expenditure here are adequately proofed to ensure best outcome for the Exchequer and taxpayer; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [17650/24]

Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)
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The country is cursed with a number of scandals in relation to overspends on public projects. Aontú is fully in support of public project. We believe in public delivery, but the biggest threat to the confidence in public delivery has been a Government that has allowed such glacial movement in terms of infrastructural projects but also massive costs in terms of the delivery. The Government is in many ways incinerating taxpayers' money on so many projects. Vital projects are spending years in planning and delivery. I am asking what controls has Minister in terms of public spending.

Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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Will the Deputy name a school that has gone over budget?

Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)
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I have a list of projects that have gone over budget but I will use them in the second part.

Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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Will the Deputy name a school that has gone over budget?

Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)
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I have a list of projects that I will tell the Minister about in my own time.

Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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That is fine. The reality is that when it comes to the delivery of the national broadband plan, an important school or important health projects, the majority are delivered on budget. If they are not delivered on time, it can be because of delays that take place in the planning process. We are not in a position to control the planning process. We are in a position to control the legislation around it, but not the decisions that An Bord Pleanála makes and that the judges make to respond to concerns that citizens may have that are beyond the control of the Government.

In the context of the role that we play in relation to the evaluation and the management of taxpayers' money, it happens at two different levels. The first is where funding is allocated to individual Departments allowing that to be used in the way we intend. The second is where, project by project, depending on the scale of the project and its cost, we have infrastructure guidelines that require different levels of accountability and business case evaluation. Those are the two ways in which it is done.

Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)
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The Minister mentioned accountability. I am not aware of anybody in the senior levels of the Civil Service who has ever lost his or her job because a project went over budget. I am not aware of anybody who has even been moved sideways.

I will give a couple of examples. We had a farce here where €2 million was spent on a Dáil printer nobody could fit in the door. We have the national children's hospital, which was promised for 2020 at a cost of €700 million, barring an asteroid hitting the planet. We do not have an opening date yet and it is 2024, with €2.25 billion being the cost. We have the Department of Health overspending on a property owned by Larry Goodman because it did not measure it properly. We had €22 million spent on ventilators that never worked. We had Government spending €50,000 housing the ventilators that do not work, then spending €500,000 going to court against a Chinese firm to try to get its money back. The HSE cyberattack was unbelievable. A parliamentary question I submitted on that showed the Taoiseach was spending more on press statements and public relations than was being spent on the cybersecurity centre, which did not even have an office or a national director. That cyberattack then cost well over €100,000. I do not see any accountability with any of those.

Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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One minute the Deputy is talking about overspend and the next he is talking about cyberattacks. The Deputy pretends - I say pretends because I find him entirely unconvincing in his arguments - to be making the case for the stronger State and the State doing more. I thought he was a left-of-centre politician when it came to the role of the State, but he does not appear to give the effect of that in the tone he uses about the State. It is of course the case there are individual projects the State acknowledges it got wrong and could have done differently. I have acknowledged that on many different occasions, especially with the national children's hospital, but I challenge the Deputy to name a school that has gone over budget. He should look at the progress that has been in the delivery of the national broadband plan. He should look at the progress we make in the delivery of roads and public transport projects. Of course, when the State is spending what will soon be €15 billion per year on the delivery of public infrastructure, there will be issues with how that is delivered. However, the majority of projects are delivered in the way the taxpayer wants.

Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)
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Aontú want to give people confidence in the delivery of public infrastructure. This confidence has been radically eroded by the lack of Government prudence and the lack of Government ability to hold the system to account. A Minister tasked a civil servant with creating a tender for the national children's hospital. There are people who are responsible for the spending disaster that has happened. Some €300 million has been spent on the metro north system and there has not been even a shovel put into the ground. Down in Midleton we have old people working as human water gauges trying to look at the amount of water that is rising in the rivers there to ensure it does not inundate families and cause people to get killed because Governments have spent millions of euro and still have not even got a planning application for the flood defences there. We also have the massive increase in spending that is happening in the budgets at the moment. We have had Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael engaged in pre-election auction politics at their ard-fheiseanna. We have a system where the Government dresses itself up in fiscal prudence, yet is wasting hundreds of millions of euro of taxpayers' money.

Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent)
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I thank the Deputy. We are way over time.

Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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Is the Deputy going to make reference to all the flood relief programmes that work? Is he going to acknowledge any of them? He brought up ventilators a moment ago. He is just the sort of Deputy who would be excoriating the Government if the ventilators were not available in the first place. We were in a crisis situation at that point-----

Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)
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A person would lose their job-----

Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent)
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Deputy.

Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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We were trying to save lives at that point.

Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)
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If it was a private company there would be loss of jobs.

Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent)
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Deputy.

Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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I can understand why he is behaving the way he is, a Leas-Cheann Comhairle-----

Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)
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Deflect.

Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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-----it is absolutely fine. The Government was trying to get ventilators at that time because we were in the middle of a global health emergency. It is frankly below the Deputy to bring into a debate like this the attempts that were being made to source ventilators for our country in the middle of a health emergency.

Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)
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Ones that would have worked.

Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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I acknowledge, and have done on many occasions, the mistakes and things we got wrong-----

Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)
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But not accountability.

Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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-----in relation to the national children's hospital, but we will hear that from the Deputy. For a man who pretends to believe the Irish State can be the source of more answers to many of our difficulties-----

Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent)
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I thank the Minister.

Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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I will conclude on this. We will never hear the Deputy acknowledge that the Government, the State can do anything right-----

Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)
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The State does things. The Government is not doing it.

Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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-----and it can, it does and he does it a disservice.