Mick Barry
Question:3. Deputy Mick Barry asked the Taoiseach when Cabinet committee D (infrastructure) will meet next. [42739/17]
View answerWednesday, 25 October 2017
Questions (3, 4, 5, 6)
Brendan Howlin
Question:4. Deputy Brendan Howlin asked the Taoiseach when Cabinet committee D (infrastructure) will next meet. [44892/17]
View answer
Richard Boyd Barrett
Question:5. Deputy Richard Boyd Barrett asked the Taoiseach when Cabinet committee D (infrastructure) will next meet. [44702/17]
View answer
Gerry Adams
Question:6. Deputy Gerry Adams asked the Taoiseach when Cabinet committee D (infrastructure) last met and when it is scheduled to meet again. [44614/17]
View answerOral answers (24 contributions)
I propose to take Questions Nos. 3 to 6, inclusive, together.
Cabinet committee D met on 15 September 2017 and the next meeting of the committee is scheduled for 23 November 2017.
The committee’s terms of reference relate to infrastructure and its main focus at present is on housing and the forthcoming ten-year capital plan.
Since the meeting on 15 September, the Government has announced a number of additional measures following the review of Rebuilding Ireland. These include a range of actions in budget 2018, involving increased expenditure allocations, taxation changes and the establishment of Home Building Finance Ireland to provide additional finance to developers.
The Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government has also announced further actions in respect of the rental market and the planning system.
The draft national planning framework - Ireland 2040 - was also published for consultation in September and the final version will be published in December, alongside the new ten-year capital plan.
This approach will provide clarity, coherence and certainty in respect of planning and capital expenditure, while facilitating a sustainable approach to meeting Ireland's future investment needs.
I understand that Cabinet committee D covers Irish Rail. Some people might be surprised that the next meeting of the committee is scheduled for 23 November given that there will be a national rail strike next Wednesday. It will be the first of five. The strike is being staged by a group of workers whose pay has effectively been frozen for ten years and who do a very good job.
Irish Rail carried 43 million passengers in 2016, an increase of more than 3 million on the previous year. The problems in the company do not stem from the workers but from successive Governments. In 2007, the State subsidy for Irish Rail was €189 million. Last year, it was €110 million. That is a massive cut, in the region of 70%.
I was told this morning that the workers have been offered a pay increase of 1.75% but there are lots of strings attached. The first is that they would accept line closures and the second is that they would effectively refund their pay increase through forced redeployment, reductions in contracted hours, freezing of increments, etc. Some workers could have their pay cut by as much as €60 per week. The Taoiseach expressed concern about the effect of a strike on working people. There are two groups of working people involved here, namely, the commuters and the staff. By sticking to its policy of low investment in the company and low pay for staff, it seems that responsibility for the strike lies at the Government's door and that it is responsible for the difficulties faced by working people. Would the Taoiseach not consider convening a meeting of that Cabinet committee to ensure a decent pay increase for these hard-pressed workers?
Does the Taoiseach have a definitive date for the publication of the capital plan? We should agree the national planning framework at least in tandem with, if not before, we allocate money under the capital plan. It seems we are now pushing back the date for finalising the national planning framework and I agree with that because there are many new submissions to come in. We need to get it right but it seems odd that we would determine the next decade of capital expenditure and then determine the national planning framework. Does the Taoiseach have a view on that?
The Taoiseach will recall that during our time in government I set a limit of 10% on the amount of money that could be allocated to public private partnerships, PPPs, in proportion to the overall capital budget. By their nature, PPPs are more expensive and it seems odd that we would opt for them if we can borrow money at a much lower rate on the open market now. We needed PPPs when there was fiscal constraint and we could not borrow sufficient money. I hear talk about loosening that and having more PPPs when, after we reach our medium term objective of a balanced budget in structural terms next year, we should be able to borrow significant moneys at a much cheaper rate. I would be interested in hearing of the Taoiseach's attitude to PPPs in the context of the next development plan.
One very important part of our national infrastructure is ports and harbours. What is the point in the Government's passing legislation, such as the Harbours Act 2015, when nothing happens afterward? The Taoiseach probably helped to prepare the legislation given that he was Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport up to July 2014. The Act sets out future of ports of regional significance, including Dún Laoghaire Harbour, and this was supposed to reflect national ports policy. Two years on, however, nothing has happened to Dún Laoghaire Harbour. Under the legislation, responsibility for Dún Laoghaire Harbour was to be transferred to Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council.
I told the Taoiseach repeatedly while he was Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport that there is a totally dysfunctional, out of control, unaccountable quango in Dún Laoghaire Harbour coming up with madcap plans that never materialise but cost a lot of money to dream up, such as giant cruise berths, which were shot down, floating pools, floating hotels and floating apartments. What is needed is for the harbour company to float off into history and for the harbour to be taken under the control of the people and the local authority, which will come up with plans that respect the unique heritage and importance of Dún Laoghaire Harbour and reflect the aspirations of people locally, instead of nothing happening. A lot of money is being wasted. There are major financial questions hanging over the harbour company after due diligence studies and risk assessments that go on and on but nothing happens. Will the Government play any role in expediting what were intended to be the consequences of legislation that was passed two years ago in respect of Dún Laoghaire Harbour?
Has a Cabinet committee discussed the urgent need for investment in our wastewater and sewerage infrastructure? The wastewater treatment facilities in 50 of our large towns and cities do not comply with EU standards. These include the facilities at Ardee, Drogheda and Dundalk in my constituency. Untreated raw sewage is still entering the environment in 44 urban areas. The Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, warns that projects to deal with a high risk of pollution and a threat to public health have been delayed for at least three years. These projects include those at Ardee, Blackrock, Castlebellingham, Drogheda, Dundalk, Dunleer, Omeath and Tallanstown in County Louth. They are among 148 priority urban areas where improvements are required in order to meet the EU standards. This local infrastructure is failing because of the consistent lack of investment by Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and, also, the Labour Party when it was in government.
It is amazing, is it not?
That has resulted in the European Commission taking the State to the European Court of Justice for breaching the urban waste water directive. There is the potential for a substantial fine. What actions has the Government agreed on to meet this challenge?
Details of the renewed funding for Traveller-specific accommodation and the implementation of Traveller accommodation programmes were published recently. The purpose of the review in this regard was to examine how these programmes were working. It found that they are not working. A total of €55 million for Traveller accommodation remains unspent since 2000. The Government now has the report. What is it going to do about it? How quickly will take action?
At the start of this year, the Taoiseach's predecessor told the House that the infrastructure plan was finished and ready to go. It was in an advanced enough state that the Taoiseach, during the leadership campaign, announced the figures with the then Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Donohoe, smiling alongside him. Since then, it has been delayed repeatedly. Despite this, the medium-term capital investment figures in the recent budget were not changed. The delay is not about points of scale and substance, it appears to be purely presentational.
Last week, the head of the strategic communications unit announced that he would be running a campaign to sell the new infrastructure plan. How much will be spent on this and will the campaign be prepared before the Cabinet agrees the plan? The failure to deliver on capital plans is a recurrent problem with this Government. Every housing target has been missed and we discovered in recent days that work on 25% of the schools announced as beginning construction in 2015 has not started. Before the Taoiseach publishes any new plan, will he agree, or undertake to publish, a statement on the delivery of current targets? Not many statements have been made recently, although we heard for two years that the Government would build so many houses and schools. Could someone please analyse and compare what has been constructed with what was committed to, promised and announced?
The Taoiseach will be aware that several schools, including some in our constituency - a number of them DEIS schools - effectively required to be rebuilt or remodelled under the schools building programme and, in particular, the schools refurbishment programme.
The plans have been submitted. I understand that in many cases, contractors fell by the wayside given the collapse of the construction industry. Nonetheless, the delays are now running past a year and a half. I am really concerned about the future of some schools. In respect of an enormous number of recently built and extremely fine schools in Dublin west, teachers in long-standing schools are being left in the freezing cold with the rain coming in and no insulation. The Taoiseach referenced this during various constituency functions we have both attended. These schools are now two to three years behind the given date that was published in good faith. What is going on with regard to the schools building list? Is it an attempt by the Minister for Education and Skills to hold back money? Is it simply confusion in that Department so that they cannot get the schools we need built?
Cabinet committee D mainly covers infrastructure but it also covers transport, which is a key part of our infrastructure. It is a Cabinet committee. Cabinet committees do not deal and never have dealt with industrial relations disputes. These disputes are dealt with by the Workplace Relations Commission and then by the Labour Court if a resolution cannot be found. It is correct to say that Irish Rail staff have faced a prolonged pay freeze for the best part of ten years and are now being offered a small pay rise. It is important not to forget that there are lots of people who did not have a ten-year pay freeze; they had very substantial pay cuts and will not see their pay fully restored until 2019 or 2020. Many of those people will be the passengers who are affected when the rail strike occurs and we should be cognisant of and sensitive to that fact because these people are not being offered a pay rise and will lose money by not being able to get to work that day. Obviously, it will impact on businesses as well.
There are many strikes in public transport in Ireland. There is a disproportionate number of strikes in public transport in Ireland relative to other sectors but they are always resolved whether they involve the Luas, Dublin Bus or Bus Éireann or previous strikes in Irish Rail. They are always resolved and after talks at the Workplace Relations Commission or on the recommendation of the Labour Court. Unlike other sectors, there seems to be a requirement that there be a few days of strike before an agreement is made, which is disappointing and unnecessary because I do not believe that the final agreement made by the unions and the employers would be any different if there had not been a couple of days of strikes on the bus or the railway before the agreement was made because strikes are ultimately futile. All they do is damage the companies concerned, cost the striking workers money, inconvenience passengers and cost other people too. I would much prefer to see industrial disputes being resolved in the Workplace Relations Commission and the Labour Court without a strike just as they are in so many other semi-State bodies and so many other parts of the public service.
There is no date for the publication of the new national development plan, although we are targeting the month of December. It is intended that the national planning framework and the ten-year capital plan should be done at the same time and agreed and published at the same time because they need to speak to each other.
I support public private partnerships, PPPs, in principle. I think they have worked well. Much of our motorway network was built through PPPs, as was the case with many of our new schools, which are very fine buildings. However, I do not think PPPs are universally good. I do not like the idea of people referring to PPPs for public infrastructure as though they are off-balance sheet. They are not. It is just that the cost is spread over 40 years rather than over three, four or five but they are very much on-balance sheet. It is not free money. It is money that has to come out of taxpayers' pockets and PPPs can be very expensive. Sometimes it is cheaper to borrow the money up front given that interest rates are so low rather than go for a PPP model but there can be advantages as well, not least the fact that the risk is partially shared by the private sector and that, therefore, spares the taxpayer some of the risk. Second, it is a bit like a mortgage. While it might be cheaper to buy a house up front, sometimes one just cannot do so because one does not have the cash so it makes sense in those circumstances to pay it off over 40 years in the form of a PPP.
I am not up to date with developments at Dún Laoghaire Harbour Company. The plan was to transfer it to the local authority thus allowing it to be developed as an amenity for the area, which is the right future for that harbour. Some of the small harbours have already been transferred to local authorities, for example, Sligo and Wicklow. I am not sure what the reasons for the delay are in that particular case.
In respect of capital spending, I may have picked Deputy Micheál Martin up wrong but on budget day, the Minister for Finance did announce additional capital allocations to Departments for 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021. While it is always the case that some capital projects fall behind schedule, it is important to acknowledge that over the past five years there has been considerable progress in terms of our public infrastructure, much more so than people might have expected during a period when we had very little money to invest in infrastructure. Over 200 new schools have been built, which include many fine buildings in my constituency. A total of 67 primary care centres have been built, including three in my constituency. Having not built any new public hospitals in the best part of 15 years, as I speak, there are now three-----
That is not true.
It is true. Tullamore was the last one. Having built none since 1997 or 1998, there are now three under construction - the national rehabilitation hospital in Dún Laoghaire, the new national children's hospital with satellite centres in Blanchardstown and Tallaght and the national forensic mental health hospital. Wings of hospitals were built, as were major hospital developments such as-----
Come on, be honest with people.
I am being honest. There certainly were so, for example-----
The Taoiseach is a terrible propagandist. The Mater or St. Vincent's-----
Examples would be the Nutley wing in St. Vincent's University Hospital or the Whitty Building at the Mater Hospital but there have been no whole new hospitals.
The maternity hospital in Cork.
That is part of Cork University Hospital.
It is a brand new maternity hospital.
I will give the Deputy that one. It is a fine hospital. The point I am making, which is also the truth, is that we now have major new hospitals under construction, which is the big deal, quite frankly. I hope a fourth one will be under construction by this time next year, which would be the new national maternity hospital on the Elm Park St. Vincent's campus.
As the Deputy knows, Páirc Uí Chaoimh has been built and was officially opened at the weekend. Newland's Cross has gone - the last set of traffic lights between Dublin and Cork. The N11 has been upgraded and New Ross and Enniscorthy roads are under construction. The Gort to Tuam motorway, which is the single biggest infrastructure project in the west of Ireland, is now complete, as is Luas CrossCity, which will be opened to passengers in the next couple of weeks. That is the report on progress made so far but I will be happy to add to it and give some more detail at a later stage.
Unfortunately, the EPA report comes as no surprise to anyone in this House. There are 40 locations around the country where raw sewage and wastewater is still being released into our rivers, seas and lakes. This should not be happening in a wealthy modern Western country. Many of the problems highlighted in the EPA report stem from a long-term legacy of bad policy such as the fact that we failed to invest in water and wastewater infrastructure, in part because it was funded by general taxation. One of the downsides of the abolition of water charges is that, once again, water and wastewater projects have to compete with health care, education and other projects for funding when they could have had a dedicated source of funding. Another factor was the very fragmented set up run by local authorities rather than a single utility model like the ESB or Bord Gáis Networks, which would have worked a lot better. It is now being put right. With Irish Water, we have a single utility model, which is very much the ESB model. It is a publicly owned utility with a national remit and expertise. So far, Irish Water's priority has been clean drinking water and a huge amount of progress has been made since 2014 when Irish Water was set up. The number of boil notices is down by 75%, 20,000 boil notices have been eliminated and 90 million litres of water is now being saved every day because of the first fix free programme so people can see the success Irish Water has had in improving our drinking water. Obviously, the next step will be moving to wastewater. At least five projects will be completed this year - Youghal, Belmullet, Rush, Killybegs and Bundoran. What is remarkable is the fact that there are still people in this House who oppose the Water Services Bill and still want to break up Irish Water.
If there is one sure way of making sure we reverse the progress we have made in providing people with safe, clean drinking water, and making sure we get nothing done in the next number of years when it comes to wastewater and the discharge of raw sewage into our rivers and lakes it is to rip up Irish Water all over again. I would certainly encourage people who are opposing the Water Services Bill in the House and who still want Irish Water to be abolished to have some regard for our environment and public health and to drop their embargo on the Bill.
It was the Government's cuts in 2011 that did the damage.
We will move on. That Taoiseach proposed to take questions Nos. 7 to 11, inclusive, together. Is that correct?
Yes.
We have very little time remaining. We have eight minutes.