In her Irish Independent column last Saturday, Sarah Carey applauded Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers for his efforts to hold back the tide of public spending.

She lists the principal reasons for caution in managing the budget, including the reliance on corporate tax from a small band of US multinationals, but her main grievance is the failure in recent years to control Government expenditure.

There seems to be no problem, including the rising world price of oil, for which extra budgetary largesse here in Ireland is not the popular solution amongst politicians of all parties.

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Ministers circulate press releases daily announcing uncosted expenditure plans while €750m was allocated to fuel subsidies in response to the blockades of public roads by farmers and hauliers.

This sum was denounced as inadequate by Sinn Féin and the smaller parties of left and right. For the opposition that may be par for the course, but the Government is meant to take national solvency seriously.

Jack Chambers heads the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (DPER), established in 2011 in the wake of the budget collapse and the insolvency of the State itself, bailed out by the IMF and European Union institutions.

It was staffed initially by officials from the former public expenditure division in the Department of Finance, who did not even have to change offices. Its establishment was an acknowledgment that things had to change and that loose expenditure control in previous decades was an ingredient, along with the banking bubble, in creating the disaster.

But shuffling civil servants around is not a policy: the key policy change was the declaration of a big departure from previous practice, called the Public Spending Code. DPER would have its own minister at cabinet but more importantly, major capital projects would in future require sign-off from the new department.

A later revision of the code provided for post-completion reviews to be published by DPER on all large capital projects, once both the final costs and realised levels of benefits had emerged.

The advance evaluations prepared to support projects are usually undertaken by whatever State agency or quango is in charge, or by whatever consultants they engage.

These evaluations often understate costs and exaggerate benefits, a problem not unique to Ireland, and do duty as lobbying documents for the interests the agencies represent.

Several countries have introduced formal systems of independent after-the-fact assessment as a discipline on the boosters of projects, intended to discourage the authors of initial assessments from excessive optimism.

These evaluations often understate costs and exaggerate benefits, a problem not unique to Ireland, and do duty as lobbying documents for the interests the agencies represent

They will know that external examiners mark their homework. And they should, since the demand for public funds, for current as well as capital projects, is essentially unlimited.

In Ireland the infamous Bertiebowl, a plan for a third stadium at Blanchardstown on the outskirts of Dublin in addition to the Aviva and Croke Park and for which there would have been no fixtures, received in 1999 a favourable cost/benefit appraisal from an impressive list of consultants employed by the quango promoting the stadium.

It was stopped by the then Taoiseach’s coalition partners, the Progressive Democrats, rather than by an official evaluation process, saving the Exchequer about €800m.

In the event, the Public Spending Code was never placed on a statutory basis – it was essentially advisory.

When the then-secretary general of DPER, Robert Watt, objected publicly to the National Broadband Plan in 2019 on grounds of cost and risk to the public finances, DPER was overruled by the Government.

The Public Spending Code has subsequently been abandoned for all practical purposes and there is no system of oversight for large capital projects.

Thus there was no advance oversight of the National Children’s Hospital by DPER, where the overshoot will reach roughly double the cost of the Bertiebowl, and there has been no announcement of a post-completion review.

So far as I am aware, there has never been an independent post-completion review of any major project in Ireland.

The Public Spending Code has subsequently been abandoned for all practical purposes and there is no system of oversight for large capital projects

The current Government has breached its own spending projections in recent years and continues to do so. Several sizeable overshoots had already emerged at the end of the first quarter of 2026, suggesting that the expenditure projections in health and education were promulgated at the end of last year in the certain knowledge that early overshoots were inevitable.

Rather than reliance on Minister Chambers in his efforts to encourage restraint on colleagues, every one of whom has incentives to resist, a change of regime is feasible.

This would see the Public Spending Code placed on a statutory basis, requiring formal written sign-off on large capital projects by DPER as well as independent post-completion assessments, all to be published.

An alternative would be to scrap DPER, return its officials to the Department of Finance, and pray deliverance from the next fiscal crisis.