John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I read the Minister's script twice. I thank him for coming to the committee in person. We have a lot of work to catch up on. I know from previous membership of the Committee on Budgetary Oversight that the Minister has always made himself available, and he has not let us down today. I hope the technical issues can be cleared up as time goes by.

The Minister's statement mentioned the level of unemployment, which has thankfully fallen, although I believe it has risen a little in the last week. It would be useful if the Minister could present figures for youth unemployment to the committee. We received briefings from the independent Parliamentary Budget Office earlier this week. The Minister's statement mentioned that support disbursed by the State amounts to €24.5 billion to date. As the Minister says, this is a colossal sum, amounting to 14% of national income. The transitional Government which held office between the previous Government and the formation of the present one bolstered particularly vulnerable sectors of the economy at a time of great national need, and in that sense fulfilled the unwritten social contract that exists between the State and its citizens. As a member of the Committee on Budgetary Oversight, I would like to flag the fact that most of this went unaudited, unsupervised and unquestioned. There was general quiescence from the Opposition regarding this expenditure. It is a huge sum of money, and other committee members and I would like to review that spending in detail. We owe that to taxpayers. I hope I am not misquoting the Parliamentary Budget Office, which indicated that digging down into these figures was difficult. Any assistance the Minister's Department and the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform could give in that regard would be very welcome.

Several medical measures pertaining to GPs, medical cards and other issues were outstanding from budget 2020. They were meant to have been put into effect in July and were not. The Minister might be able to report on them. I accept that these were micro-issues.

I was very taken with the pre-budget submission of the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, IFAC. It is a conservative group. When Mr. Seamus Coffey was the chairman he used to remind us that the purpose of IFAC was to institutionalise the memory of the crash. We tend to think of that in terms of what went wrong. Today I am minded to think of the impact of the crash on vulnerable people and the pain it caused. As a committee, we should listen to IFAC. If we are to institutionalise the memory of the crash, we should also institutionalise the memory of austerity. I warmly welcome the general thrust of IFAC's submission, which essentially counsels against penny-pinching at this time. The submission refers to three phases and advises the Government to keep those supports going at least until the second phase, when the pandemic begins to disappear, please God. I know that tax and income figures are good and there has been an unexpected bounce.

I have a couple of questions concerning the budget. I received a text from a publican in the city today. It cost him €80,000 a month to remain shut. He has laid off 25 people. The Chawke Group, which includes the Old Orchard Inn and is run by Mr. Charlie Chawke and his son Mr. David Chawke, laid off 300 people yesterday. Delays to Covid-19 payments to staff were a big issue. Some 300 people will now be depending on social protection payments for a period. These delays are not good enough.

The publican to whom I referred contacted me this morning to say he was thinking of investing in weather proofing for the outside of his premises to accommodate a marquee type of set-up. This would cost him €10,000 and he wanted to know whether I thought it was worth doing or if the option to provide an outdoor service would be shut down.

The second issue I want to raise is the fact that Dublin city is dying. The convention centre, where the Dáil sits on some days, is beside the headquarters of PricewaterhouseCoopers. I spoke to someone there recently who told me there used to be 1,500 staff working at their desks in that building but now there are only 100. The Minister will appreciate that the impact of what is happening on local sandwich bars, restaurants and coffee shops is absolutely phenomenal. There were packages of supports from the Government for businesses in counties Laois, Kildare and Offaly but there does not seem to have been any such package for Dublin, particularly for the city centre. I acknowledge the efforts of Dublin City Council in trying to facilitate people coming into the city.

This leads me to the issue of remote working. The Government said something about it during the week and I ask the Minister to flesh out what is proposed to be done to get people back into work. Leinster House has functioned through the crisis. There are 400 or 500 people working here, although some are probably still working remotely. Surely there is a cohort of Dublin city workers who could come back to work safely while others continue to work remotely? What incentives does the Minister intend to offer in that regard to help bolster the economy in the city next year? I make no apologies for trying to champion the cause of the city, because it is dying. We have discovered during the Covid crisis that it is utterly over-reliant on tourism and remote working is adding to the problem. Is there any research being done on people's views on remote working? Everybody thought it was the greatest thing since the sliced pan at the start of the Covid pandemic, but it seems to be the case that some people are no longer as keen on it. Perhaps a blended working arrangement would be the best thing psychologically, if for no other reason.