Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

If one looks for a moment, the whole economy progress and tangent can be upset, undermined, overtaken and overthrown by a departure from realistic budgeting, realistic expenditure etc., and by people charging €1,000 a night for a hotel room and so on and so forth. We need to remember that if we go down that road, we will not survive. We will be in a serious position because we will not be competitive. We will not be in the marketplace and we will not be able to compete.

I was a member of a committee in 2008 that was brought over to Brussels to be advised and told by every sector, every commission and every commissioner’s office how we had gone wrong and the damage we had done to Europe, our own economy, the European economy, the precedents we had set and so on and so forth. I remember not being pleased at listening to that for three quarters of a day because I had raised the same questions long beforehand. Some of the same people were there and did not respond even though they knew we were going in the wrong direction at the wrong time. The trajectory was all wrong and needed to be arrested.

Public enemy number one at the moment is inflation. It can take off so rapidly that it could bring the country to a halt. We need to do everything possible to avoid that and try to ensure we do not allow individual segments of the economy to proceed in an inflationary fashion, such as charging €1,000 or more for a hotel bed night. It is not feasible or possible. It did not cost that to put it there. When people say there is a war on, in what way has the war affected that? Not at all, is the answer, but it is to provide for something we do not know about it.

I will go back to what I started on. I have raised numerous questions to the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform over the intervening years about the degree to which Departments can be compared in terms of performance, whether we are all on one track and going in the same direction at the same time, whether some are some holding back, and whether some segments of the industry may be progressing well and some perhaps not so well. The whole emphasis has to be on not going back to where we went wrong before. It is as simple as that and there is a danger of that.

The Department officials can claim no responsibility for that at all if they want to, which I will not believe. However, I am throwing it out there to air it.