Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."

I am pleased to introduce the Appropriation Bill 2024 to the House. It is critical annual financial legislation. It has to be enacted before the end of the year to give effect to the authorisation of voted expenditure throughout 2024 and to allow for the continuation of expenditure into 2025. It has two main functions. The first is to provide legal authorisation for all of the expenditure that has occurred in 2024, on the basis of the Estimates voted on by the Dáil over the year. These allocations are known as the amounts to be appropriated for supply services. They are set out in section 1 and Schedule 1 to the Bill. These relate to the Revised Estimates, Further Revised Estimates and Supplementary Estimates that have been agreed by the Dáil over the course of the 2024. In net terms, these amount to €86.5 billion. In gross terms, and taking into account expenditure on the Social Insurance Fund and the National Training Fund, total gross voted expenditure allocated for this year is €104.3 billion. This reflects the Government’s sustainable investment in public services and a balanced and budgetary approach that will support households and firms, deliver improvements in public services, boost the resilience of the economy and further enhance the capital stock, including, most importantly, homes.

Our social protection system seeks to provide an effective social safety net for the more vulnerable members of society. The 2024 gross expenditure allocation for social protection, including spending on the Social Insurance Fund, is over €27 billion. This helped to improve our social welfare system. It delivered a €12 increase in core weekly rates and increased the income of an estimated 1.45 million recipients. It delivered increases to the qualified child payment and working family payment income thresholds and to the domiciliary care allowance rate and other important measures.

Investment in the Irish health service has also delivered better outcomes for our citizens. Ireland now performs well on treatable and preventable causes of mortality and has made significant improvements over the past decade, including reductions in the mortality rate for all cancers. We have had the highest proportion of a population reporting good or very good health among all EU countries as of 2022. The number of people on waiting lists for outpatient care has fallen since 2021 and there have been significant improvements in the average waiting time of patients.

Housing has also seen a considerable increase. In 2023, 11,938 new social homes were delivered. It is expected that this delivery will continue to grow in 2024 and grow in future years as the delivery pipeline continues to increase. A sum of €8.3 billion in funding is being provided this year for the housing, local government and heritage Vote group, including €4.9 billion in capital funding.

Education funding in 2024 saw the provision of an appropriate school place to over 970,000 students in primary, post-primary and special schools around the country, with a record number of teachers, almost 77,000, employed by the Department of Education. Close to 1,200 new teachers were employed in September 2024 for the commencement of the 2024-25 school year. Education capital expenditure in 2024 is supporting the continued progression of the 350 building projects currently at construction, while also facilitating close to 90 school building projects that are to proceed from tender stage to construction over the course of 2024 and early next year.

Funding has also enabled a range of other schemes and initiatives across government. In transport, the continuation of fare initiatives has helped with cost of living. There has been further investment in greenways and active travel. In further and higher education, we continue to invest in our apprenticeship programme, which is delivering 16,000 places this year. Provision to support childcare providers through the core funding scheme has ensured that fees for parents using these services have remained frozen, while the subsidies through the national childcare scheme have continued to increase. Over 200,000 children have benefited from the national childcare scheme to date this year, with out-of-pocket costs for parents having fallen by up to 50% for users of full-time early learning and childcare. The NCS subsidies are worth up to €5,000 per child in 2024.

A balanced approach to public service pay was achieved in the public service agreement for the period to 2026. The funding outlined in the Appropriation Bill reflects the Government’s continued commitment to responding to challenges as they arise. Of course, one of the greatest challenges we have experienced recently is the impact of inflation on living standards. I am conscious that so many are still worried about heating and lighting their homes this winter. We have a further package of cost-of-living supports in this budget. The 2024 cost of this package, of €2 billion, of progressive supports for households and businesses, including two €125 energy credits, are reflected and included in this Bill.

The second principal function of the Appropriation Bill is to provide a legal basis for expenditure to continue into next year. As set out in the Central Fund (Permanent Provisions) Act 1965, the authority for spending in 2025, prior to the agreement of the 2025 Estimates by the Dáil, is based on the amounts included in the 2024 Appropriation Bill. For this reason, it is essential that this Bill be enacted before the end of 2024. Should that not happen, there would be no authority to spend any voted moneys from the start of January 2025 until the approval of the 2025 Estimates.

To account for the complexity of very big projects, we now have multi-annual capital envelopes in place. This allows for the carryover of up to 10% of unspent voted capital.

Schedule 2 to the Bill sets out the proposed capital expenditure amounts that are to be carried forward to 2025 by Vote. This stands at €207.21 million, which is 1.6% of the total 2024 gross voted Revised Estimates capital allocation of just over €13 billion. The carryover figure is on a downward trend and is much lower than the carryover amounts requested by Departments in recent years. It reflects our increasing ability to spend our full capital budget in any given year for which it is allocated.

As in previous years, the Bill includes a provision for repayable advances from the Central Fund to the Paymaster General’s supply account in order to meet certain 2025 Exchequer liabilities due for payment over the first week of January.

The provision for these advances is critical as the banking system will be closed on Wednesday, 1 January. This means it is necessary for the funding to be in place in departmental bank accounts before the end of this year in order to meet those liabilities on a timely basis.

The Bill also provides for prefunding certain payments under Social Welfare Acts due between 1 and 6 January 2025 that are made on an agency basis by An Post. The advances provision in the Bill ensures that these payments can be transferred from the Department of Social Protection to the network of An Post offices throughout the country. Section 3 provides for up to €900 million to be advanced from the Central Fund to meet these requirements. This is a higher amount than in recent years due to payroll dates accruing in early 2025. This is technical, and any advances needed would then be repaid to the Central Fund next January.

This Bill is an essential element of housekeeping undertaken by the Dáil each year. It will authorise in law all of the expenditure that has taken place in 2024 on the basis of the Estimates voted on by the Dáil over the course of this year. It also provides authority for voted expenditure to continue in the period between the beginning of January 2025 and when the Dáil approves the 2025 Estimates. This is to ensure continued funding for the delivery of front-line public services, investing in health and education services, social protection payments, funding An Garda Síochána and so forth. It reflects the continuation of a planned approach to public spending. I commend the Bill to the House.

Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein)
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Every year, I try to speak on the Appropriation Bill, which is usually taken in the run-up to Christmas week. With the election pending, this Bill has obviously been brought forward. Every year, the Minister's statement makes the same omission. He said the appropriation is based on the Estimates voted on during the year. There is one Estimate which I do not recall ever being voted on in the way the other Estimates are. It does not come before any committee but appears in the budget expenditure report. The Minister will know which one it is. It is Vote 15 - Secret Service. It is not a big sum of money in the context of what we are discussing and it is not enough to delay. It appears as a separate subhead and even though the Minister tried to be helpful last year and other Ministers have tried to be helpful in other years, it still has not been allocated to a Department. If it was allocated to a Department as part of a group of Estimates, so be it. Does it fit in with the Department of Defence? No, because it sits on its own. Does it fit in with the Department of Finance to maybe stop cybercrime? No. Does it sit with the Department of Justice? No. The secret service Vote in this Dáil and in previous Dáileanna sits on its own. It had a different number previously. It was Vote 15 in recent years and I cannot remember what number it was before that.

This anomaly needs to be addressed. It is obviously not going to be addressed in this Dáil but it should be addressed in a future Dáil, in that the Minister should just allocate it to where it is appropriate. I have never sought information on the exact amount of funding. It is a small amount of money. If it goes to the area on which people say, on the quiet, it is spent on, then so be it. If it is the amount that is spent on securing and protecting the services of the State in the way other countries do that, it is a minuscule amount. It is not about the funding. The figure was even lower and has stayed constant for the past ten years in my memory.

People have laughed at this and said, "Oh yeah, the secret service", and I have sometimes been quite flippant about it but there is no secret service. It is not like we are in Britain, where MI5 is answerable to a committee of Parliament in some ways. We do not have that mechanism but maybe we should have it. That has been a discussion in the background in the Dáil in recent years, especially with regard to cybercrime and so on. Maybe there is a need for greater disaster planning and planning for how to tackle what we saw when the HSE computers went down. If that is what is meant here, then so be it.

The only thing I could find is Ireland's Secret Service in England. I have a copy of the book here. It is from 1924. It does not address a secret service organisation. Edward Brady wrote the book, which is about activities engaged in Britain from 1919 to 1921 by those who were acting under the authority of Michael Collins. I do not know whether that organisation continued. As far as I know, the IRB disappeared. There is no secret service, to my knowledge. There is an organisation within the Defence Forces, J2, which comes under the Defence Forces Vote and deals with intelligence. It is not a secret service. It is open and answerable to the military authorities, as are those within An Garda Síochána who are involved in the area of surveillance.

This is an anomaly. I will not labour the point. I will deal with other issues when we reach Committee Stage.

Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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As was said, the purpose of the Appropriation Bill is to give statutory authority to the amounts voted on by the Dáil during the year from the original Estimates, Further Revised Estimates and Supplementary Estimates. If the Bill was not enacted, the Departments could not spend. The Bill also allows for capital carryover as per the Finance Act 2004. Each Department can carry over 10% of its capital allocation to the next year.

The key to this Appropriation Bill is that it is a constitutional requirement and is essential to ensure that the Departments can spend come January. For this reason, we will be supporting it. The Bill used to be waved through the Dáil without debate. It is important that this is no longer the case. Obviously, everything is rushed because we are to have an election, so there is not much time for discussion. If anything, this House needs greater scrutiny of the budget and spending. People at home have had their eyes opened about this Government's approach to spending their money. The Government cannot properly manage to construct a bike shed or a security hut for a reasonable price. I do not need to remind anyone of the wholesale mismanagement of the national children's hospital.

Capital investment is key not only in dealing with the major cracks in public infrastructure but is also a key driver with regard to job creation and regional development. The public needs housing, healthcare, community centres, flood defences, roads and critical infrastructure. In Mayo, the chronic shortage of housing is the number one reason that constituents contact my office. There are simply not enough social and affordable homes being built and the Government knows this. Housing need is rising across the State continuously.

We also need investment in Knock Airport and our rural roads. For this reason, it is astonishing, as people will see, that €129 million is being carried over to next year that was unspent this year. We also have the western rail corridor that needs to be started immediately. Without this vital infrastructure, we cannot fulfil our true potential along the western corridor and the Atlantic economic corridor. Additionally, the ports and harbours in Mayo are in need of investment. I recently raised the situation at Porteen Harbour with the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine.

With regard to the €31 million unspent in agriculture, the debacle around the agri-climate rural environment scheme, ACRES, the scoring and not having the information that is needed for farmers is such a deterrent to farmers engaging in the climate change actions they need to do. I have followed all of the schemes, from rural environment protection scheme, REPS, 4 and the agri-environment options scheme, AEOS, to the green low-carbon agri-environment scheme, GLAS, and ACRES. One after the other, these schemes have been a diminution of what they are supposed to do with regard to facilitating farmers to farm in a climate-friendly way. It is an absolute failure of the Government, particularly with regard to ACRES. There is no way that any other sector would have to go through what farmers have to go through in order to get the payments they are entitled to.

I turn to education and the carryover there. The school estate is also in need of attention. Earlier today, we had visitors from the Castlebar Educate Together school in the House. It was promised a new school building two years ago, but nothing has happened since. In fact, it is not two years ago, it goes back further. I talked to sixth-class students today who have been promised a new school since they started, and it still has not happened. They are still operating across three locations in Castlebar. That is an absolute headache for families with multiple children attending the school, particularly where there is a child with special needs, and they cannot be schooled together with their sibling. It is unfair on these children that a proper school identity cannot evolve with different children being educated in multiple different unsuitable locations. Castlebar primary school was also in touch with my office regarding a playing field that is required. St. Gerald's College in Castlebar regularly has to close its gym because of leaks in the roof. There are no excuses for it when we are dealing with so much money here. There is no excuse that so many places are left behind. We find in County Mayo and the west that many places are left behind. It is not right. We need positive discrimination if anything for infrastructure that needs to be done in the west to fulfil our potential and move from the disadvantaged position we are in. There is no shortage of need for capital investment from the Government. I ask the Minister to ensure this is where Government funding goes, instead of to projects that people did not want or ask for.

I have to raise the issue of the pyrite redress scheme again. Day after day, I talk to homeowners who face the scourge of the pyrite scandal. We need 100% redress now. We need a full public inquiry into how this was allowed to happen and the light regulation or absence of regulation of the quarries and suppliers.

Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats)
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I will take a minute at the start because the likelihood is that this is the last time I will speak in this Chamber after a very long period. I express my sincere thanks to the voters of Dublin North-West who placed their trust in me and voted for me over a period of 32 years. I will say that I am exceptionally grateful to them for doing that, and I have been honoured to represent the people of Dublin North-West throughout those many years. I also put on record my appreciation and thanks to my staff, Jake Ryan, Paul Mulville and Ryan Kelly, and to others through the years who have provided exceptional support to me, and without whose support I would not have been able to do this job. I thank all of them.

I turn to the legislation before us. To a large extent this is a box-ticking exercise. It is yet again a situation where there really is not any scrutiny of the legislation we are required to support or get through this House. I will spend my short time dealing with one particular area where there is a huge underspend, as detailed in the Bill. This year, almost €130 million has been deferred to next year by the Department of Transport. This accounts for approximately 60% of the total deferred surrenders. It is a huge amount of money. Year after year, the Department has one of the highest underspends despite the urgent need to progress public transport projects. The Minister, who along with me represents the northside of Dublin, will be only too aware of the need for investment in public transport and we have waited a very long time.

This situation is completely indefensible. How can we expect to meet our climate goals without a major acceleration of public transport projects? Under successive Governments, one abandoned or delayed public transport project has followed another. We may now have a Government that says all the right things on public transport infrastructure, but we still do not have one capable of delivering those projects. It is 24 years since the Dublin metro was first proposed and we are still at least a decade away from this project being delivered, and that is in a best-case scenario. This project was first proposed in 2000, with a target for delivery of 2010. Had it been delivered it would be turning a profit by now, but at the end of 2024 it still has not even been granted planning. I accept that Transport Infrastructure Ireland also has questions to answer when it comes to this delay. It is not just the Government. TII, after all, arrived at the oral hearing with 200 previously unseen documents, meaning public consultation had to be reopened after the public hearing. The repeated failure to deliver MetroLink has made communities on the northside of Dublin, such as the ones I represent in Dublin North-West, understandably sceptical that this project will ever be delivered. They have been seriously let down time and again. Dublin North-West is the only constituency in the greater Dublin area without any rail service at all, and there are many constituencies, principally on the southside, that have good bus, Luas and DART services. In Dublin North-West we are entirely dependent on buses.

In that regard, the Minister will also be aware of the particular concerns currently in his constituency and mine with regard to the withdrawal of the 11 bus service. Residents in Wadelai, Hillcrest and Glasnevin are to lose a vital service with the removal of the 11 service next month, under what I regard as an ill-judged plan by the NTA. The 19 service is set to replace the 11 service but it will be a far inferior service to the existing one. When the 19 service is introduced, local residents will be required to change buses to continue south of the city and further afield, including a lot of elderly people and those with mobility issues. In Dublin North-West we have approximately twice as many people aged over 65 as the rest of the city. This decision shows no regard for the profile of the local area or its needs. This decision needs to be reversed and, at a minimum, the northside leg of the 11 service must be retained for the next two years, as the southside leg is being retained. If we want people to use public transport more in our city, we should be scaling up services, not cutting back on them. We all agree with the principles underpinning the BusConnects project, but we need to bring communities with us. The only way to create the buy-in needed is to make BusConnects a success. It will only be a success if it meets local needs. The NTA must reverse this decision and begin engaging meaningfully with the local community and its concerns.

On the subject of public transport provision, Dublin North-West has also been repeatedly failed in respect of light rail services. When the Luas was first proposed many years ago it included a line to Ballymun, but regrettably that part of the plan was abandoned. There were to be three lines, including one to Ballymun. The extraordinary justification at the time was that not enough people drove cars in the area and the aim of the Luas was to reduce the number of cars on the road. How discriminatory can you get? Such a narrow criterion for inclusion was desperately shortsighted but unsurprising. This part of north Dublin has been neglected for decades and denied access to good-quality public services and the mobility necessary for full participation in social, cultural and economic life. The justification that MetroLink will provide that connectivity rings pretty hollow locally now, given how long this project has been promised, and yet is still undelivered. I have been involved in the consultation relating to the current iteration of MetroLink and have put out leaflets and information about it locally, but it is the third iteration and consultation that local residents have been involved in. You cannot blame them for being sceptical about this ever being delivered and the inability of successive Governments to think big and deliver large-scale transport projects.

It is welcome that the Finglas Luas has finally been approved by the Cabinet, but its delivery must be prioritised to address years of underinvestment in sustainable, high-capacity transport solutions for our area. I fear that this recent announcement may be little more than a cynical election ploy. I sincerely hope that is not the case and that there is real political will to get this project over the line. However, experience would suggest otherwise. I was clearing out my office and came across some ten-year-old leaflets. The Finglas Luas was promised then and we are still waiting. It is now more than four years since the first public consultation on this project and the delivery date has already been pushed out from 2028 to 2031 and that is at the earliest. Is it any wonder people have lost faith in the State's ability to deliver these major public transport projects?

It must also be said that the planned route for the Finglas Luas has one glaring omission. There is an opportunity to interchange with the proposed MetroLink route. Instead of continuing the Finglas Luas to Ballymun where the MetroLink is set to stop, the current proposal terminates at Charlestown. That does not make any sense at all. Why is the scope of the project so limited? Linking the Luas and the metro at Ballymun would provide unparalleled connectivity with the airport, not only for Finglas, but the greater Dublin area. Why is it that the north side of Dublin is only getting an additional four stops? One only has to look at the length of the existing green line on the south side to see there is a clear imbalance. There is an urgent need to address the poor public transport provision on the north side of Dublin. That is why the Department of Transport's repeated underspends must be called out. Not only should these important projects be viewed as a long-term public good, they are also critical to our transition to a carbon neutral society. They have the ability to be transformative socially, environmentally and economically, but they have to be more than plans. They have to be realised. The next government must show some ambition and prioritise delivery of these essential public transport projects, because what has been missing is not a commitment to these projects, but a commitment to actually delivering them. We have not seen the political will to do that to date unfortunately.

Martin Browne (Tipperary, Sinn Fein)
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When I hear of a carryover of expenditure of almost €130 million related to transport, I have to ask why are the people of County Tipperary who live along the route of the N24 faced with continuing funding uncertainty regarding the N24 project? Both parts of this project have in recent years been subject to uncertainty. Tipperary County Council has been forced to write to the Department expressing concern at this.

In recent weeks, I attended the design update for the Limerick Junction to Cahir project, but it is again subject to the uncertainty of the funding regime and sponsors of the project have to beg for money each time. This is an important project. It is important for road safety along the N24 and along its route, the interests of specific towns and villages are intertwined with it. I was told that certain parts of the project could be considered as stand-alone and could be fast tracked if the money was available. However, without funding, the elements that could provide the most immediate relief are beyond us. With this in mind and the intolerable traffic situation in Tipperary town and the effect it has on civil life, business and tourism, this funding uncertainty must end.

Funding issues are also faced on the Cahir to Waterford part of the project, slowing down progress and raising questions about the Minister's commitment to the south east as well as the mid-west. Today, a meeting of the Carrick-on-Suir and Waterford councils took place. There are serious concerns about this project. Huge money has been spent to complete stage 2 but stage 3 is stalled because of a lack of funding. There was cross-party support for stage 3 to be funded and completed as soon as possible and the money that has been spent so far will be wasted. The N24, when finished, will connect Limerick on the west coast to the east in Waterford and will be of huge benefit to all the regions in this corridor. People need to be put first and that must apply to any future sequencing of projects such as this one.

Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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In some ways, this is a formality we go through at the end of each year. As I understand it, it is the final authorisation of the expenditure of money throughout the year and of money that will be carried over that has not been spent. It is an opportunity to dwell a little bit on the issue of the expenditure of the enormous amount of public money totalling €86 billion. It is the public's money and it is an extraordinary fact, with this record level of expenditure, we can still be in a situation where we have more than 100,000 people on housing waiting lists, huge numbers of people are not eligible to be on social housing waiting lists because their income is too high, but they also cannot access affordable housing, almost 1 million people are on hospital waiting lists, people are crowded on trolleys in our public health service and 110,000 children with special needs are waiting for therapies and services. Vulnerable children who need those services are waiting years. I could go on about the failure to deliver for many people with this enormous amount of money on basics such as housing, health and services for vulnerable children with special needs and those with disabilities. Some of that is about having to spend more money, but some of it has to be questioned. Are we getting the best value for the money we are spending?

I certainly want to take this opportunity to make a point to the Minister and to anyone serious about trying to address some of those big problems. The Government produced a report about construction costs - I think it was done by people in The Housing Agency - which came out at the end of September. The Minister may be familiar with it. It made for sober reading in that it showed that currently an semi-detached house on an estate is being delivered at €450,000 for a new build, apartments at €550,000 and suburban apartments at €590,000. That is a high price for something we absolutely need but it is clearly unaffordable for a huge number of the people who need the housing. That is a demonstration of significant market failure and the inability of the market to deliver housing at an affordable level. This is relevant to the expenditure of public money because a huge volume of the housing the State has delivered has been purchased from private builders. To address an existential and urgent housing crisis, I have actively campaigned for the State to do that. It should buy houses when it has not built them. I would prefer if it was building them in the numbers necessary, but I am in favour of us buying them to make up the deficit because we need social and affordable housing. However, it should be obvious that we could be getting a lot more social and affordable housing if we could deliver the houses more cheaply than the private market is capable of delivering them. That is why there is a serious - I am convinced of this and I would like to convince this House and whatever Government comes in - need for a State construction company and it could deliver housing more cheaply. Why? Even the biggest builders in the country do not have the scale necessary to deliver the sort of housing output the Government now accepts we have to get to. It is double the number Housing for All originally proposed, 50,000, 60,000 or perhaps 70,000 houses per year.