Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The Deputy has covered a broad canvas. I will pick up one or two of the points he made, starting with his last point.

I had what was perhaps a naive notion when I entered this position in 2011, when we started the comprehensive review of expenditure process, that we would have much more proactive engagement with the Oireachtas on budgetary analysis. I naively thought that we would not have a big budget day announcement. I thought we would have an open discussion over a protracted period when we published the first comprehensive review of expenditure, with all of the financial options, plus the ceilings agreed over a three-year horizon with the Commission and the troika, and that we would have a debate within the Houses on where expenditure reductions should be made if they had to be made. That did not happen, for understandable reasons. The Opposition parties were not going to offer themselves as partners in reducing expenditure. If one takes the seal of office, one must make the decisions. That is understandable, but I hope we can migrate from this position as we move into a period in which we will make rational decisions on small additions.

We are never going to have boom times again. For 15 or 20 years hence, we will be dealing with a deficit that we will have to get back into kilter. At the end of this year we will be out of the excessive deficit procedure, but we will be within what it is called the "protective arm", a lovely phrase. We will still have to reduce the deficit by 0.5% or more, as long as we have a deficit greater than 60% of GDP. No matter who is in office in the future, there will be difficult decisions to be made and one will always be balancing choices. For the Opposition, traditionally - we decry the way Parliament works - it has always been, "Whatever you are proposing is wrong and whatever lobby group wants more to be spent is right." That does not provide the public with the proper basis to say whether the policies proposed are right. We decided to spend much more money on social housing, a subject very close to the Chairman's heart, at the end of last year. That means that somewhere else will lose out. Could we have a robust debate on whether that is the right priority? If one has a finite source of money, one will be making decisions on that basis.

We need to look beyond what is immediate. We have been trapped because we have been working in a crisis. In a very narrow timeframe we had to get the deficit below 3% of GDP by 2015 and, by God, that was hard work. It was difficult and challenging political work and it was challenging for the people to endure it and work with us.

There are big issues with a broader horizon and I have mentioned two that I think are important. The OPW, at the Government's request, is profiling the impact of climate change in terms of flooding. Working in a realistic way on a flood abatement plan will be a ten or 15-year project and will not be cheap, but we will have to start thinking about and providing for it. Thankfully, we have a very young demographic profile that will continue to put demands on education and so on, but there is also an ageing profile. We see the question of how we should deal with this as a welcome challenge, not as a burden. It means putting money in the basket not in the short term to gain political capital in the next general election but to safeguard the country from flooding in ten years time. These are much more difficult political choices to make, but that is what the idea of comprehensive planning and strategic thinking is about.

I have two other comments because I do not want to be too long-winded. I mentioned the Irish Government Economic and Evaluation Service.

Two of its newest members are in the Gallery. One of them is newly recruited and is here to observe, while the other is a civil servant from the French Department of the Interior, who is on secondment for one year to study how we manage budgeting. We have considerable interaction with other governments because comprehensive reviews of expenditure have become a keen issue. Some countries, such as Canada, have been carrying out such reviews since the 1990s but they do not all do it in the same way or to the same depth as Ireland. Increasingly this will be a feature in a strategic way of thinking rather ad hocbudgeting which has sometimes characterised the way we approached the matter.

We might need a long discussion in a future meeting on the Civil Service renewal programme because it is a very important development in itself.