Sean Barrett (Independent)

Yes, and the broader economic council as well. Some of the contrarians have been the subject of a media frenzy. I think they are extremely valuable people. I am glad the Minister is present and I hope he meets some of those as well.

We need a central office for project evaluation. For far too long, capital expenditure has been promoted by spending Departments and they have told the Minister for Finance afterwards that he cannot stop now because so much has been spent on it. Let us have the cost benefit analysis independently carried out, as recommended by the Governor of the Central Bank, Professor Patrick Honohan, and let us have it published and debated for a year. Then we can decide whether a project is worth proceeding with. We need more openness. The documents on the benchmarking exercise, which we are trying to reverse, were kept secret. They should at least be looked at by the Minister and, perhaps, published.

We need a value for money culture, as the Minister said. We have to address the issue of a balanced budget because, without it, we have all the problems in health and education to which this House and the other address themselves.

I hope the Minister will address the issue of tax shelters. Mr. Micheál Collins of the department of economics in Trinity College estimates, without analysis, that we give away about €12 billion per year in tax shelters to people who went, mostly with tax lawyers and accountants, through some back stairs into the Department of Finance. This is another example of regulatory capture.

The Minister referred to trawling. He comes from a fishing county. I hope he goes after big fish. I see reference to such things as the adventure playground standards authority and the industrial alcohol body and so on. There is even a reference to the returning officer for the presidential election. In defence of the returning officer, he has not cost us a penny for 14 years. I advise the Minister to go after the big people in public pay, public private partnerships and dodgy capital projects. Although he may not wish to, the Minister has to concentrate on the bulk of public expenditure, which is in health, education and welfare. I just wonder if Sir Humphrey had blown him off course to look at some very minor bodies referred to in the Schedules to the Bill.

I wonder, too, about the exempted bodies. The airports have occupied our attention in this House and the Government's attention in the recent past, and we have raised the issue of the mysterious letter from the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport to the regulator ordering a 41% increase in airport charges, bypassing the normal functions of a regulator. I hope their exemption does not mean they receive less of the Minister's attention, because they are important bodies. The McCarthy report on the State companies refers to the fact that they seem to have largely exempted themselves from the controls of their parent Departments, to have spent large sums of capital without very much surveillance, to have paid their chief executives, until the last week or so, exceedingly large sums of money, and to have exempted themselves from the general pay restraint that is happening in the public sector.

In short, the Ministers, Deputies Howlin, Noonan and Hayes, deserve our support. It is vital that the finances of this country are put back in order. The concern I would have about the April document on progress is that it leaves expenditure largely unchanged and brings in a €10 billion increase in taxation. I would hope that the energies of the Department will not be spent on inventing new forms of taxation but concentrating instead on the value for money we get for the €70 billion or so the Government is spending.

There is a serious need to overcome what Wrightsaw by comparison with Canada and the Netherlands, which is the need to recruit top level economists and not have these decisions made by generalists or amateurs. There is also a need to write down. The Department used the Freedom of Information Act as an excuse for not writing things down in case someone might make a freedom of information request to see what it did. That did not serve the Department as we now try to find out from either the banks or the Civil Service what really happened that caused the economic collapse in this country. I welcome very much the efforts of the Minister and he may be assured of the support of the Seanad from all sides. Wright draws attention to that briefly. He said a very poor budgetary process obscured ministerial and Government accountability to Parliament. We recommend major changes to the budgetary process that would enhance ministerial accountability to Parliament. I commend the Bill.