Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)

The new Department would be better titled the Ministry for cuts, slashing jobs and smashing our public services to pay off the bankers' gambling debts on orders from the EU-IMF. That is a longer title but a more accurate one. We all want to see reform. Reform is a beautiful word. Who could not want reform? Ordinary people are crying out for reform of public services. However, what they mean by reform is that they want better public services. They want more teachers in our schools so that pupil-staff ratios improve rather than get worse, as is currently the case. They want more special needs assistants and resource hours for the most vulnerable children in our education system. What they get is cuts and caps in those vital resources. Every community is crying out for more public service workers to fix the broken roads, the cracked paths and to get rid of the graffiti plastered all over the walls of estates. They want proper maintenance of estates and parklands but they cannot get it because there are not enough people employed in the public service to do these jobs. We need more public servants employed as community workers in vulnerable communities, where young children have nothing, no support, no backup and desperately need community workers to help them get a decent start in life.

We need more public sector workers in our health service. We need more nurses in order to open the thousands of hospital beds that are empty because we do not have enough nurses and health workers to provide desperately needed health services, to deal with waiting lists and with those sitting on trolleys for days due to lack of investment in staff and facilities in our health service. We need to deal with the myth, the lie and the spin that the problem in the economy and our society is the public service and that the answer to society's problem is to butcher the public service, as this Ministry will set out to do at the behest of the EU-IMF. In public debate and the vilification of the public sector deployed over the past number of years since the economic crisis started, it never gets out that we spend less, as a proportion of GDP, on every single area of public service compared to our European counterparts. As a proportion of GDP we spend less than our European counterparts on health, education and other public services. We do not have too much public service, we have too little public service. We have fewer people employed in the public service than most of our European counterparts. Our public services are in a desperate crisis as a result of that, which is inflicting real suffering on the elderly, the sick, the vulnerable, the disabled and the young. It is shocking. This Ministry is a special Ministry set up to make a bad situation worse, to slash and carve our public services and to make more people unemployed.

That is not to say we do not need genuine public service reform. We certainly do need it but let us start with politicians' salaries. It is outrageous that the Taoiseach pays himself eight or nine times what the average worker earns. It is outrageous that Ministers are on €140,000 or €150,000 a year when people on social welfare have to live on less than €200 a week. It is outrageous that this is being cut and other charges are being imposed. If we want public sector reform, let us start with slashing the salaries of politicians and Ministers. Let them see the pay cuts. Let us start slashing the salaries of top civil servants, the Secretaries General who earn €200,000 or €150,000. What about the public servants in the banking sector? Some are still being paid more than the cap of €500,000 for bankers who helped to wreck our economy. It is obscene. How can we justify paying bankers who wrecked this economy with public money and paying them 20 or 30 times what the average worker earns? It is outrageous.

Deputy Ross referred to the waste of money in the public service and he is correct. However, the problem is that most of the money is wasted because the work done by local authorities and Departments was outsourced to the private sector. Massive overruns were not because of public servants. Previously, much of the vital infrastructure projects and public housing was built by directly employed public servants. There was no profit margin creamed off by cowboy builders and cowboy contractors. The waste in public spending resulted from the outsourcing of this to the mates of people working at the top of the public sector. They creamed it when they were working in the private sector. Private developers ripped off the public with massive overruns. The answer is not more privatisation and more cuts in public services but for the people now rotting on the dole, including skilled construction workers and teachers, to be employed in the public service to provide vital infrastructure. This can take the profit motive out of the equation. The profit motive was a corrosive cancer at the heart of the public sector. Why have we seen the obscene high salaries at the top of the public service? It is precisely because the people at the top of the public service benchmarked themselves against the bankers and multimillionaires in the private sector. If the CEO with which the public sector worker was negotiating earned €500,000 or €750,000, the public sector worker believed he should earn at least €250,000 or €500,000. That is where the obscenity started. The EU-IMF deal and this new Ministry is about accelerating the problem that caused the crisis. We need to move in precisely the opposite direction.

A typical example from my area indicates the lack of willingness of this Government to listen to serious proposals for saving public money. Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council passed a capital budget to build a new super library headquarters on a public space for €35 million. The council is controlled by Labour and Fine Gael and they passed the budget. We all like to see investment in libraries but no one asked for this library headquarters. People have asked for investment in public swimming baths but no money was allocated to that. Instead, they built a library headquarters because Labour and Fine Gael wanted a trophy project in Dún Laoghaire. Today, I pointed out that the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport was supposed to be interested in saving public money and public sector reform. Beside the proposed site for the library headquarters, there is an empty building owned by Dún Laoghaire Harbour Company. It is an office block and is perfectly suited for use as a library headquarters. It is owned by the public and has been sitting empty for several years. I asked why we should not put the library headquarters there and use the €35 million saved for other projects that are wanted by local people, that would create jobs, enhance tourism and so on. The council will not do that because it is more interested in its pet project than in spending public money sensibly in a way that would create jobs. There is no doubt that private developers will make up the architects and companies given the contract for this new library headquarters that nobody asked for and that does not need so much money spent on it. These developers will be paid exorbitant amounts to build a facility we do not need. All the activities that led to the property bubble are ongoing and there has been no serious attempt on the part of this Government to do anything about it. I will be opposing this new Ministry and the policies coming from it.

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