I thank the Chairman and the committee for facilitating me and the Office of Public Works, OPW.
Vote 13 - Office of Public Works (Supplementary)
The Minister of State is welcome any time.
I might be back. As Minister of State with responsibility for the OPW and flood relief, I am here to propose a technical Supplementary Estimate for the OPW. The net Estimate in respect of the OPW Vote for 2022 is €581.5 million. I am pleased to inform the committee that this Supplementary Estimate is, in effect, Exchequer-neutral and the additional gross expenditure of €36.9 million can be fully made from savings identified on the Vote.
A total of €33.1 million relates to additional capital investment in the estate management programme, of which €30 million relates to capital projects and programmes of work on the new works subhead. The OPW has been assigned a number of high-profile projects for delivery through the national development plan, NDP, in the estate management area. The restrictions on construction activity in the early months of 2021 as part of the Government’s response to Covid resulted in delays in getting projects to construction during the year. However, the OPW has now accelerated a number of delayed projects, resulting in a significant increase in the level of committed projects on site in 2022. In addition, unavoidable costs have been incurred on foot of accelerating tender price inflation and the agreed Office of Government Procurement, OGP, co-operation framework.
The balance of the capital funds is requested to fund additional capital works at Dublin Zoo and Fota Wildlife Park, as well as increased investment in plant and machinery on the flood risk management programme. This is crucial to the safe and effective delivery of construction-related activities across the organisation.
As stated, the surplus spend can be met by savings in other capital subheads, namely, flood risk management and projects funded under the national recovery and resilience plan, NRRP. Despite trebling the number of schemes in the pipeline from 30 to 90 since 2018, a number of projects remain in the early stages. This is due to planning issues and other issues, such as a shortage of specialist surveyors to carry out surveys. Savings are profiled under the NRRP as the data centre project at Backweston did not get to construction stage at the planned time.
On the current allocation, €2 million of pay savings is proposed to be reallocated between a number of pay subheads to allow the OPW to meet its obligations following the review of the Building Momentum public service agreement made in 2022. Finally, a reallocation of €1.8 million is proposed from subheads that have been particularly affected by inflation during 2022 due to the onset of the conflict in Ukraine.
I am happy to recommend the technical Supplementary Estimate for consideration and approval by the committee and to answer any questions members may have. If I am unable to respond on their questions today, I will endeavour to revert to Deputies directly.
Gabhaim buíochas leis an Aire Stáit as ucht teacht os ár gcomhair. As the Chair stated, we are always delighted to have a Minister in to be asked a few questions. I can see from the Appropriation Account that almost €433 million was spent on the likes of maintenance and design for the portfolio of buildings and sites. I understand that a significant amount of that relates to managing protected buildings, heritage sites and so on, but I am wondering how much of it was spent on buildings that are idle. Obviously, idle buildings can incur costs relating to deterioration, dampness, mould and so on. Is money spent on the maintenance of such buildings? If so, how much has been spent to date in 2022?
I thank the Deputy. I should have said at the start that I am joined by my officials from the finance section of the OPW, based in Kilkenny. As regards idle buildings, we in the OPW have a programme that we are accelerating in terms of the disposal of properties that are no longer required. Obviously, some properties within the estate will continue to require ongoing levels of security and basic maintenance and we have to cover issues relating to damage caused by vandalism and things like that, unfortunately. I do not have the figure in front of me but I will send it to the Deputy, along with details in respect of where the money has been spent in the context the disused stock to which we are trying to give new life, either by way of local authorities, communities or public auction, which we have done in the past 12 months.
Gabhaim buíochas leis an Aire Stáit. My next question relates to the number of idle buildings. I tabled a parliamentary question in that regard in February, and the reply indicated there were 70 such buildings. I previously tabled a parliamentary question on the matter in 2020 and the reply indicated there were 82 such properties at that stage, so I recognise the number has decreased. However, these buildings are idle but could be used for all sorts of different purposes, such as through community development associations. Does the Minister of State have a figure in respect of the current number of idle buildings?
I can get that confirmed momentarily but, off the top of my head, the last time I checked before answering questions in the Dáil it was of the order of 38 buildings. I will confirm that for the Deputy. There are issues relating to title in respect of a number of properties. For example, many previously owned Garda stations that may have come into the care of An Garda Síochána prior to the foundation of the State came from estates that were untitled. Now that we are trying to dispose of them, in some cases to private individuals or local authorities, we are finding there are issues relating to title in the case of a small number of properties.
There are a number of others though with which there are no issues associated. I have stated previously and will use the opportunity again to state that the lack of engagement of some local authorities in taking disused properties from us has been quite disappointing. However, some have been very good - Leitrim and Roscommon are two that come to mind straight away - in terms of these being used as local assets. For others, where disused properties have been in their areas, the response has been disappointing. That leaves us with the option, if there is not a viable community use, of putting them up for public auction, which we have done recently. The most recent one that was sold, which was in Deputy Durkan's constituency, in Kildare, has accrued a substantial amount of money above and beyond what we would even have estimated for it. I would much prefer to be in a situation where an existing public body would take these from us, as they ultimately are public assets, but I do not want them acting as a blight in the hearts of villages and towns all across Ireland, in terms of Tidy Towns marks and everything else. It is time to move on with this. The instruction that I have given to my team in the OPW, which, in fairness, has accelerated it and which has done a really good job on it, is that disposal is the last option. Unfortunately, it is being proffered in a number of cases at present.
When such properties have been used within the communities, is there a particular type of use that has been common or is it a variety of uses? I would be interested in that.
There is a variety of different uses. For instance, in Kilgarvan, in County Kerry, through Kerry County Council it is being used for their community council. They will obviously look to have rooms as well that will be used for other agencies. In Roscommon, for example, a visitor centre centred on John McGahern was put into an old Garda station from an old OPW property. The uses are varied.
There are opportunities to get funding now, either through the Minister for Rural and Community Development, Deputy Humphreys, LEADER or local authorities, or in some cases the communities themselves. There is a lot of capital work. Some of these buildings are listed buildings. They have sash windows, old fireplaces or lime render. You name it and they have it. In some cases, the communities look at them and say that it is too challenging for them. In other places, if they put forward, for instance, an application through town and village renewal or rural recreation, they can form part of the local amenities. In some cases, they have been incorporated into towpaths on the canals and greenways. There is no exhaustive list. Anything will be considered once we find a situation where we do not believe that the community will be left with a millstone around their neck that they cannot pay for into the future because then the property would wind up coming back to us. Ordinarily, these would be in long-term fixed leases, supplemented and supported by the local authority. I have been insisting on that from the start because I do not want a small rural communities landed with a property and the local authority walking away stating that it has no responsibility there. If there are particular examples in Deputy Mairéad Farrell's area or in some parts of the country that the Deputy would like us to follow-up with, we certainly will because we have a catalogue of where every one of them is at present.
I thank the Minister of State.
I want to raise a question about flood risk management. How is it going on and what are the sensitive points throughout the country? How many of them are in hand, and how many of them have run into objections of one kind or another? For instance, there are situations where there are plans to carry out essential flood risk management works but there are objections to carrying them out. How are we getting along in that area?
The successes are varied and the challenges are immense in terms of the delivery of protection to communities across the country. I am viewing them from a policy point of view as climate adaptation and that these are responses to serious events that can happen in terms of both the tide and river basin management. They can have an impact, which is getting worse thanks to climate change.
We have made some very significant progress. For instance, in the past week, we completed the one in Douglas and handed it over to Cork City Council. The work at Springfield, Clonlara, County Clare, which has dominated "Morning Ireland" winter after winter, is almost completed. We are only waiting for some pumps there. Templemore is almost completed and Ashbourne is due to be completed shortly.
Then there are others that are more challenging. In Deputy Durkan's part of the world, the Morell project, for instance, is moving along and, when complete, will demonstrate its effectiveness. The Chairman's city of Kilkenny was relieved with a very significant one. However, there are huge gaps. The gaps are well known. Enniscorthy, County Wexford, is one, Crossmolina, County Mayo, is another, Cork city itself is a huge one and then there are parts of this city for which we will have to come up with some serious remedies around how we will adapt to the challenges of climate change, both in terms of coastal communities where the coastline is being washed into the sea - I saw an element of that east Cork the other day - and in other areas, where tide will become a big problem. I visited Holland last week and saw a tidal barrage that was built almost ten years ago at a fairly extreme cost but it is protecting 1.5 million people behind it. No doubt the challenges are enormous. The OPW, even as late as this morning, was discussing how we incorporate nature-based solutions, particularly in the context of protecting our biodiversity and protecting habitats, while at the same time recognising that we have large urban spaces that need to be protected from the one-in-200 year or one-in-100 event which, unfortunately, is becoming more frequent. There was a time that such events were infrequent. They happened once in a blue moon. Now they could happen once a year.
If the Minister of State was to select the most prominent and the most needy cases for advancement, obviously Cork has got to be one. There are a number of others throughout the country as well, in order to protect life and limb, and to ensure in the context of duty of care that adequate provision is made to safeguard the various communities up and down the country, city and country, in a meaningful way in the shortest possible time.
Last week, in western Germany and eastern Belgium, they told us of the event that happened last July 12 months when 220 people lost their lives in an event the likes of which they had never seen previously. The opening salvo out of all of the commentary was that they had ever seen anything like that previously. In Bridgetown, County Wexford, last year, the first thing they said to me was that they had never seen anything like that previously. In Enniscorthy, they said that to me, as they did in Bandon and all over Ireland. The difference is the intensity of rainfall and the damage that it is doing in catchments where the land is already sodden, and where one has a tidal issue as well, it can be catastrophic. The figures in Liège, Belgium, are terrifying: 40 people dead; 385,000 tonnes of waste; 50,000 people impacted; 100,000 houses; and 11,000 cars washed away. These are numbers that are out of a telephone book but they will give the committee an indication of the scale of the problem in not too dissimilar a population base to some of our population bases, for example, in Deputy Mairéad Farrell's constituency, Galway city, in Cork city, and in my own local area, Limerick city. These are big urban population bases, in many cases built below sea level, and if they are not protected we will undoubtedly see a catastrophic event, hopefully, not in that scale. The problem is we are racing against the clock in many cases. The explanation behind, for instance, much of our capital underspend, which is why I am here today, is as a direct result of the fact that our planning process does not reflect the needs of the community which we are now trying to address. This is a problem all over the country. It is in the Chairman's constituency and it is in the Deputy's constituency. I can list off the names of the towns and villages that are bogged down going nowhere. We have to change tack. We will have to start looking at different forms of remedies and solutions and we are open to all of those.
Is there any way that the Minister of State can accentuate the urgency of the situations for all or many of the locations concerned? Given that, for instance, in the Netherlands, the whole place is almost under sea level and they have long experience of dealing with this kind of situation, can we emulate them? Are we doing so and are the projects working? For instance, there was one particular location in Cork where we have done some work but it did not solve the problem.
The event in Cork that the Deputy is referring to was in Fermoy. It was an alarm on a sump pump that unfortunately was disconnected from a power source. Cork County Council is investigating that.
However, in regard to the schemes across Munster for the last major event, which was only last October, in all of the towns for which protection has been put in place - Ennis, Cappamore, Newcastle West, Bandon, Clonakilty, Skibbereen and Waterford city - it worked. There was no major event and we had no loss of life, which is the most important thing. We have had serious property damage in the places that are undefended or yet to be defended, and that continues. At the moment, we have approximately €2 billion worth of potential property damage that is protected by OPW-provided and OPW-led schemes. The next element is in regard to the ongoing relationship we have with local authorities in respect of schemes that are finished around ongoing management and maintenance, inspection, audit and so on. Our policy section in the OPW is looking at that.
In regard to whether it works in the Netherlands, it absolutely does. Some 30% of its landmass is under sea level and half of the population lives under sea level, and it works. The next iteration of it is going to be more challenging because questions arise, for example, do the walls continue to go up, do the dikes continue to get bigger, do the tidal barrages continue to get bigger and do they break the water out at sea? As late as this morning, we were discussing in the Department the prospect of signing a memorandum of understanding, MoU, between ourselves, the OPW and our sister organisation in the Netherlands, the Rijkswaterstaat, around collaboration, learning, education and sharing experiences. We would hope to be able to do that in the new year.
Will the Minister of State send on a list of the applications that are currently with his Department from Carlow and Kilkenny, both those that are being considered or those that are being funded? I am checking on my parish pump. There are a number of them. The Minister of State might provide general information about what is before the Department.
I will, and for the minor works as well. I would say to the Chairman and to Deputy Durkan that if there is a way of encouraging local authorities to be more imaginative around sending in applications, the minor works applications in particular, we would welcome that.
We have been dealing with Vote 13. If there are no other questions, we can move to the Minister of State, Deputy Ossian Smyth, who is dealing with Votes 12, 14 and 17.