Sean Barrett (Independent)

As always, I welcome the Minister to the House and I welcome what he is doing to try to restore the economic sovereignty of the country. I take as one of my themes a comment on page 9 of the infrastructural capital investment document that the Minister produced last week. It states: "There is a need to improve the quality and coverage of programme evaluations and it is all the more critical that individual investment projects are supported by rigorous and objective appraisals." This was a gap in the system and we need to set up and to have ready for when the economy revives proper capital investment appraisal in this country.

The Minister is preparing fiscal responsibility legislation. Proper capital appraisal should be a part of that when it is brought before us. Too many projects are allegedly analysed by the promoting agencies through public relations hand-outs. We need a strong central evaluation office. I will call it COPE, the central office of project evaluation. In his memorandum in April to the spending Ministers, the Minister suggested they carry out such an evaluation quickly before they are captured. The capture of so much of the public capital programme by the construction industry and the capture of all of Government by the banking industry three years ago did not serve this country well.

Capital is wealth set aside for the production of future wealth. It is no longer adequate to mention verbally some benefit and to suggest ipso facto a project should go ahead. All of this should be quantified to determine whether a project represents any return on the capital involved. We must carry out ex post cost benefit analyses as well to determine where the mistakes were made because the process involves learning for the future. The Minister's constituency colleague was here some time ago discussing the Central Statistics Office and its professionalism and independence were the two key factors he stressed. We need these in economic appraisal and evaluation as well. We are keen to know whether projects have come in on cost and whether there is any penalty when they do not because that is standard moral hazard problem. We want to know the shadow prices, test discount rates and the opportunity cost of projects. We want independence in these evaluations. We are keen to see measures that the Minister is bringing forward with regard to the registration of lobbyists. Too many of these projects arise from lobbying.

The proposed whistleblowing legislation is relevant as well. Often at gatherings of senior public servants I have been told that a certain person knew that a given project was no good but they did not write it down or tell us. This is a parliamentary democracy and if there are doubts about projects, they should be expressed. If the proposed whistleblowing legislation helps this, it will be valuable to us. Project appraisals should be published at least one year in advance and then the Parliament and those in public life and wider civil society should be allowed to come up with alternatives. Sometimes the alternatives are damned because they are chosen by the person who is promoting the main project.

One of the lessons from the independent Irish fiscal advisory council, a good model to follow, is that multipliers in Ireland are small. This is a small, open economy and one should not expect great stemming benefits. A project must be good in itself and not reliant on multipliers. I was pleased to learn that Edgar Morgenroth from the ESRI is helping the Department because he has an outstanding reputation and his expertise is needed.

I am concerned with some of the old-fashioned rules. The engineers promoting the Clontarf seafront project maintain they must spend the money in five weeks or it will be gone. If the money goes back to the Minister for Public Expenditure and Control, Deputy Brendan Howlin or the Minister for Finance, Deputy Michael Noonan to spend on something else, I have no objection. The question is whether it is a good project. That is an old engineering problem which has been around for some time.

I am a sceptic of public private partnerships. The convention centre is mentioned in the document. What will this cost and what will the annual losses amount to? Is it simply a case of hire purchase, an expensive way to buy anything? Capital is not free; it must be properly costed in projects. I look forward to some of these developments in the fiscal responsibility Act due to come before us.

Page 18 of the document to which I referred earlier refers to a business case but I am sceptical of this. Is this a case of a project not passing a cost benefit analysis and then subsequently someone else was asked to prepare a business case, whatever that is? We need tight definitions rather than a collection of clichés. With regard to the fiscal responsibility Act we are probably dealing with the fact that when the public capital programme was introduced in the 1940s it was done on a rather casual basis. However, it needs a strong legal basis on which it can be implemented.

I turn now to some of the correct decisions the Minister made last week and which I commend. There is always concern when a project is dropped such as the A3 road from Aughnacloy to Derry but there are two seriously underperforming toll booths on the M3 between Kells and Dublin and there is a requirement to compensate the partners involved. If there is evidence that the demand for something is not what we expected it would be when we planned the project then we should not continue to repeat the mistake. There are similar concerns with the Limerick to Cork motorway. The Limerick tunnel is costing us money and we must compensate the private partner because the demand has not materialised.

I was always sceptical about metro north. If one is on the east side of the city one can access the airport quickly from Sandymount, Blackrock, Dalkey and such places through the port tunnel and if one is on the west side, the M50 improvements mean one can also get to the airport quickly. I note there are 1,200 mostly empty parking spaces at the Dunboyne M3 Parkway area by the railway station. Any case for extending the railway from there to Navan must demonstrate whether there will be a pick-up in demand because it is not evident at the moment. Besides, Navan is already served from Drogheda by train and if people want this we should establish whether we can run a rail car on it.

Capital investment is not always a solution and sometimes it goes wrong and one must learn form these lessons. The DART underground was always a mysterious project. One can travel from Connolly Station to Heuston Station by LUAS and there is also a double-track railway line with concrete sleepers and electronic signalling that goes past Croke Park, Phibsborough, Cabra, under the Phoenix Park tunnel and into Heuston. We were asked as part of the DART underground project to build a third railway line between two railway stations in Dublin. It seems bizarre that the project ever advanced so far in the then Department of Transport.

Rail safety was mentioned. I hope the faults in the system that missed the Malahide viaduct collapse are remedied before we put in any more money. The Sea Scouts seemed to see it and, fortunately, the driver of the train who set off the alarm saw it as well but the people in charge of railway safety at the top level did not see it.

The Minister mentioned integrated ticketing. It appears that it will cost €60 million to persuade three State transport companies to accept each others tickets. This is a bizarre situation. In the Minister's constituency we gave money to Rosslare Europort and then someone took out the train tracks and located them half a mile away so that one must walk in the rain to get there. It is a good job we have wheelie suitcases. What was the purpose of the project to remove the train from a station which had been built with European money and our money? There have been many other strange capital projects. We built an investment project in Dún Laoghaire Port but we did not get any guarantee of its use and it is now idle for half the year because the company concerned has no wish to use it.

We must also develop industrial policy on a broader front. Some €4.7 billion is refereed to in the document but the concern is that since 2005 there has been a drop of approximately 50,000 people working in manufacturing. The public relations hand-outs that accompany industrial policy in Ireland should refer back to reality.

Brendan Drumm believes our health services are heavily institutionalised and other speakers have referred to this. I realise the Minister is bringing forward legislation to de-regulate the general practitioner lists so that perhaps some health care can be transferred, as recommended in many of the texts from hospitals, to the general practitioner and the community. I appreciate the Minister's enthusiasm for the new hospital he proposes but perhaps we have too much of a hospital fixation given that there are alternative ways to manage health care.

More strongly, many people in criminology welcome the decisions to put Thornton Hall on reserve. Alternatives to be considered include electronic tagging, the probation service, community service and restorative justice. There is no need for an edifice complex in capital expenditure dominated by the construction industry. I dislike using the cliché but if there are better or smarter ways of doing things then we should do them. The Minister made many correct decisions last week. We need to improve the context in which the correct decisions were made because I would be afraid once the Exchequer filled up the same people who were awarded projects on previous occasions would be back.

We need a strong professional, independent economic service in the public sector to do this. We need to learn the lessons from having to be bailed out by the IMF, the ECB and the EU. I wish the Minister every success in that endeavour.