Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I share in the earlier remarks from Deputy Mairéad Farrell in wishing the Minister well over the next period of time without pre-empting anything. We all know that it is intended that he will move across the corridor next weekend. I wish him well and I am sure he will miss these occasions once a year when he is moving the Appropriation Bill, as the country watches in. I am equally sure that there is nobody watching the World Cup match this evening and they are all watching in attentively on this debate on the Appropriation Bill.

It was not long ago when the Appropriation Bill simply went through on the nod, so at least we are having some form of debate and parliamentary interrogation of this Bill, which is probably much more than can be said for the kinds of Supplementary Estimates that were presented to us this year. We all know that there is a requirement to spend much more than the Government, or anybody on the Opposition benches would have anticipated, when budget 2022 was formulated in October 2021. Nobody could have anticipated the Ukraine crisis and the impact that that would have on energy costs and on the cost of living, more generally; or the impact that the cost of living would have, especially for people who depend on the State for their income. The Labour Party supported initiatives to provide for forms of once-off expenditure to help people who are in difficult circumstances at the moment.

We have also been critical of the fact that those once-off measures, once they are gone, they are gone. The reality is that the cost-of-living crisis is not going away. Indeed, the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, put on the record earlier on that it is likely that we will have high energy costs to deal with over the next two years at least. In other words, energy costs will not come down and even when they do, they will not come down as quickly as they had gone up. I have no doubt that we will be back here in the spring, and the Minister will be here in his new job presenting new proposals and measures of expenditure to assist families and businesses to get through what clearly will be more challenging times next year and the year after.

I believe we have had €4.4 billion of Supplementary Estimates presented to us this year. That is a big chunk of change in anybody’s language and I will take the Minister back to some remarks I made last year, and the year before, when we were dealing with the Appropriation Bill around the question of parliamentary oversight of expenditure.

Constitutionally, it is the job of the Dáil to approve Government expenditure but the reality is that expenditure has always been a creature of Government, being rubber-stamped, in effect, by the Dáil. This was one of the weaknesses that the OECD and others identified in their post-crash analysis of how we do public policy in this country. I will take the Minister back to a report in 2018 by the OECD where it ranked Ireland a shocking 61st out of 70 countries when it came to parliamentary engagement in the budgetary process. The OECD felt that there was almost no revision whatsoever of budget proposals by the Legislature and stated that this would be difficult to view as beneficial for fiscal democracy.

The most important thing we do in this Chamber on an annual basis is the allocation of moneys to Departments in the public interest and the reality is that there is little scrutiny of that. It is improving in the sense that we now have the Parliamentary Budget Office and the Committee on Budgetary Oversight, both of which do a very good job, but there is no doubt that we could improve that pillar of democracy. In truth, very few improvements have been made by this Government in respect of the interrogation of those figures or of a real role for this Parliament in formulating budgets.

One of the things we need to look at very closely is the way in which moneys will be allocated under the temporary business energy support scheme. While supporting the thrust of the scheme, I have been a critic, for example, of the way in which the temporary wage subsidy scheme and the employer wage subsidy scheme were designed. I was front and centre in revealing the information that several hundred million euro were paid out under the wage subsidy scheme to businesses which were paying out dividends to shareholders in companies which clearly did not need it. We know that there is an emergency at the moment but some of those lessons in respect of the design of that scheme need to be applied to the design of future State support schemes, where considerable amounts of money were transferred from the State to private businesses. We all accept and understand that businesses require support this year to be able to make ends meet, keep the doors open and to keep people in employment.

We need to keep a watching brief on the performance of the TBESS. I mention that in the context of 2022 and the Appropriation Bill because some of the moneys allocated towards the end of this year will be used to resource that scheme, which is being backdated, to the best of my recollection, to the autumn. That is welcome. We are spending €1.2 billion of public money. Any other country across Europe we care to mention attached some form of conditions to the allocation of money from the public purse to private enterprise. We know it is needed, but we can perform better in terms of the conditions and requirements we might attach to schemes like that.

This year there has been a significant capital underspend. Some capital is being carried over. Inevitably, that will be the case but the one that sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb is the amount of moneys that remain unspent in the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage. I welcome one initiative from the Minister. I did not have the opportunity to mention this earlier in my speech on the confidence motion. I refer to a decision made by Government to relieve local authorities of expensive loans they took out, Louth County Council included, in the mid-2000s at the instruction of the then Minister and Department of the Environment to buy expensive land on which they planned to build public housing. Those loans have been a noose around the necks of local authorities. This is public land owned by local authorities on which public housing could be built. I am pleased the Minister is using some of the resources that remain available in the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage's budget this year to relieve local authorities like Louth County Council of, for example, a €56 million debt on two sites in the Drogheda area that could accommodate up to 300 units. This is happening on the basis that those units would be developed on a fast-track basis in 2023-2024, something that is welcome.

Deputy Farrell mentioned that the idea that we are carrying capital over on the basis that we do so every year, or very routinely, is almost a failure of the Government to plan. We understand there are pressures in terms of labour, costs and so on, but failure to spend half a billion euro in the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage at the time of a housing crisis is quite perverse.

I will conclude on a general point. The surplus that the country will generate on the backs of hard-working people and businesses this year is quite extraordinary. It is something that this country ought to be proud of. We should be proud of it, but it is perverse that people are waiting for public housing and are on health waiting lists. People are demanding a step change in the provision of renewable energy and building up that infrastructure, but we do not have the capacity to spend sufficient amounts of that money to try to make the improvements we ought to make to our society and economy. We are still, in an international context, spending much less than the countries we like to compare ourselves against in terms of public investment, whatever way we might describe it, whether compared to GDP or, more appropriate in an Irish context, GNI*.

Due to our recent history, we have had a period of significant under-investment and we are playing catch up. We need to play catch up. We need a conversation in the House about how we properly resource our Departments and the NDP. I accept we are spending significant amounts of money on the NDP to achieve the objectives we want to achieve for this country.

When the Minister becomes Minister for Finance shortly, Ireland needs to be front and centre in arguing against any attempt to impose a fiscal straitjacket in terms of the reimposition of a form of fiscal treaty rules. We need space to be able to invest in our infrastructure and economy to make sure that we address the issues around catch up, especially around renewables, critical infrastructure and housing.

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