The Minister's Green Party colleague, the Minister for Transport, Eamon Ryan, has continued to oversee what is nothing short of a farcical situation when it comes to national roads funding, with just 34% of projects having gone to tender under pavement improvement schemes involving road safety and realignment and new national road schemes in this calendar year. We signed off on a capital plan in February 2024, three months later than is normally the case. This has been a continuous issue for the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan. What has the Green Party got against roads and the projects we need to progress in rural Ireland to improve road safety, reduce fatalities and deal with the chronic underfunding of road programmes, which has been a huge issue in my constituency? In this regard, I draw attention to the Fermoy, Castlemartyr and Midleton schemes, all of which have been held up because of continuous funding uncertainty. What is the Government, including the Minister, going to do about it?

I thank the Deputy. We had a useful discussion on the wider roads budget with Deputy Healy-Rae earlier. My understanding of what Deputy O'Connor is referring to is that it relates to the issue of TII dealing with its own budget. It has been given a budget and that has not been cut. TII has the same budget it had at the start of the year and it has to make decisions on supporting some of the really big roads projects that Deputies across this House called for and also some of the smaller projects. I understand there was a movement of money earlier in the year to support the key steps on some of the bigger projects. More recently-----

Improvement projects cannot be funded. That is what is going on.

-----some of the money that was unspent has gone back to support the smaller road programmes. Ultimately, TII has a budget that it has to manage, like all the rest of us across government.