John McGuinness (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

-----but they come into the Chamber to deliver them without politically proofing them in any way. Some of the comments I heard from Ministers and other contributors on the Government side outlined some of the advantages of this budget and the positives, but they completely ignored the issues at stake. I heard comments and glowing references about the health service, for example, when nothing could be further from the truth. Waiting times for operations and assessments in hospitals are getting longer, while patients are on trolleys waiting for consultants' reports. Priority-listed patients move from Waterford Regional Hospital to Cappagh Hospital and back again and have to wait at length. I was dealing with one urgent priority case that had been referred in 2010 and the lady in question had not had her operation. That is scandalous.

I refer to medical cards. Long before this budget was announced the Government was refusing to give out medical cards. There was consternation when the administration was moved to a central location, a move that led to all compassion and understanding being removed from the medical card system. Cancer patients were refused medical cards. Even before the budget was announced, people were being notified either by the practice they were attending or their chemist that their medical card had been withdrawn. Yesterday in Kilkenny when the son of an 80 year old woman went to collect her medication, he was told that his mother was no longer the holder of a medical card. She only receives the old age pension and this happened before the changes to be brought about by the budget kick into place.

Either God or the devil is in the detail, but in this budget it is the devil. When one examines the finer print, one sees that it excludes people from receiving medical cards. The changes made to income levels and age qualifications, such as those for persons aged over 70 years, will impact hugely in a negative way on the people queueing to obtain services from the HSE, a body which, from a financial perspective, is in a complete shambles. Only two weeks ago the Secretary General of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform said there would be no overrun. He then corrected that comment to say that as of then there was no overrun. However, we know that by the end of the year there will be a serious overrun in the Department of Health, one that will be almost uncontrollable. In April the HSE applied to the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform to have an information technology system built in that would give it all of the facts, figures and management tools it wanted. This application has not yet been dealt with or approved. What is counted is done. Either the HSE or the Government is not willing to count what is being done and as a result, millions of euro are going to waste in the health system.

Let us turn to the business sector and be straight. The Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources, Deputy Pat Rabbitte, has left the Chamber; I had hoped he would stay. He cannot utter a sentence without referring to events prior to 2011, Fianna Fáil and "that Government." Fine Gael and the Labour Party received a mandate in 2011 and have introduced three budgets since. The Minister's party camped out in a shop on Grafton Street, demanding an end to upward-only rent reviews, but it abandoned ship on that issue very quickly when it entered office and walked away from it. The shop on Grafton Street is now closed and yields no rental income. I am sure an institution somewhere owns it, but the actual business has suffered. Throughout the country small businesses are closing down or reducing numbers. That is a fact.

Certain parts of the economy are doing well. Enterprise Ireland is making an enormous impact abroad in terms of trade promotion. Ms Julie Sinnamon, who has replaced Mr. Frank Ryan as chief executive officer, will make an excellent contribution. I know of her work and she is an excellent public servant. That, however, amounts to Irish companies doing it for themselves abroad, with the help of the State, whereas we all know that the indigenous sector, the retail trade, is not merely flat but out cold on the ground. People have no confidence to go out and spend. If one looks at any high street in any city, town or village, one will see establishments with old trading names which have closed and that shops have been boarded up. People and families who provided decent employment in rural Ireland are gone.

The Government's answer to the plight of publicans was to increase their difficulties further in the pricing of alcohol and the structure for how we sold it. It refused to recognise the big issue of the day, namely, that people were taking drink home rather than enjoying the social aspect of a pub or hotel. On the one hand, the 9% VAT rate worked, for which I credit the Government. However, on the other, the increases in rates, insurance and every other cost, including of how publicans administer their books for the State, are now proving so costly that they are putting people out of business or causing them to take a second look at the possibility of remaining self-employed. That is wrong. Some of the finest people who have left would have become wonderful entrepreneurs had they been encouraged to stay. Nothing in the area of self-employment would encourage a person to enter it and create jobs. The Government has completely neglected the sector and now it intends to overturn the county enterprise boards and include them with local authorities. That is a daft idea. If something is working, why bother tampering with it? That is what the Government is doing. I find it incredible that it has overlooked all of these issues.

I refer to social welfare payments. The Labour Party is now asking people to live on €100 a week. It is taking them off the dole and sending them on courses that have no relevance to the possibility of finding employment. It will not even listen to the people affected who are willing to offer ideas, saying that if they were to do such and such, it might work for them. The attitude is: "You do it this way or not at all." That is not helping the jobs market. It does not lead to the creation of the courses necessary to enable people to gain employment. The Government is making little or no impact, although vast sums of money are going towards this purpose.

I have a final point on Government expenditure. Every Thursday the Committee of Public Accounts, of which the Minister of State, Deputy John Perry, was once both a member and Chairman, sees vast sums of money going to waste.

Tomorrow we will deal with the case of a seven-storey building that costs €1.4 million in rent, of which only one floor is rented. The State picks up the tab. The lease runs until 2034. The Government must dismantle all of those things. It must examine what is coming before the Committee of Public Accounts. I introduced a Bill based on comments from the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources, Deputy Rabbitte, and many others, yet the Government voted it down. The Government would not allow us to examine expenditure in the local government area. It voted the Bill down. Yet it took the Comptroller and Auditor General to find waste of €119 million in local government. If that side of the balance sheet is not joined up then the Government will continue to fund useless projects and projects that go to waste. If the Government had had that money available to it in the budget then it would not have needed to crucify those whom it did crucify, namely, the marginalised, the less well-off and the elderly. All of those will suffer. If the devil is in the detail of the budget, the Labour Party certainly is not.

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