Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

I congratulate the Minister on the presentation of his first Finance Bill. We are starting a process which will probably run to 24 hours of solid debating about the Government's tax policy. My main criticism is that we are devoting this huge block of time to a debate about what is essentially tinkering at the edges of our tax structure, while we ignore the elephant in the corner, namely, the Government's huge increase in public spending with very little to show at the end of the process. I am glad the Minister at least adverted to this issue in his address. He sees the elephant out of the corner of his eye but is not facing it foursquare. This is the primary issue that needs to be addressed in the public finances of the country. Why are we spending and not making the impact on issues that really do matter?

To put this into perspective, since 1997 when Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats came to power, public spending has increased by €29 billion over what was spent in 1997, an increase of 133%, which is an extraordinary increase in a very short space of time historically. We need to ask what difference this huge spend has made. This is the essential issue for both sides of the House to address. How is life different for ordinary people following this spending? You, a Cheann Comhairle, with your medical background, will know more than most that it is very hard to see the impact in, for example, primary care. Fewer people, both in absolute terms and as a proportion of the population, now qualify for free access to primary care than qualified in 1997. Even people on the minimum wage do not qualify. With the huge spend, why did we not make an impact? While fewer people are now attending our accident and emergency departments than in 1997, they do so in conditions of worse chaos than ever existed, despite the huge increase in spending.

Street violence and public disorder offences have surged. Crime detection rates and drug seizures have decreased. These are core issues that people expect to be addressed by a successful spending programme. However, those problems are getting worse. The first-time buyer has lost out in the housing market. Housing lists have soared. The Government's tinkering with the housing market has made it worse. School drop-out figures have not improved in any way.

These are the people who should be the targets of our public spending. It is people on low income who need primary care, people with health emergencies attending our accident and emergency departments, children at risk of dropping out of school and people terrified about violence on their streets who should be at the core of the debate about the use of our public money. We do not properly enter that debate. We have not faced up to this issue. I hope the Minister's changes will address that problem.

Do we have a solid structure in place to address our infrastructural deficit? We are now drifting to the bottom of the league across the range of key infrastructure. The Government has committed the big spend in the national development plan. We need to have a serious debate and ask hard questions. For example, why will the roads programme, originally estimated at €7 billion, now, three years on, cost more than €16 million, according to the Comptroller and Auditor General, with fewer than half of the projects completed on time? Is there a serious failure in the capacity of the public service to deliver these programmes? What was contained in the contracts?

Is everything in the garden rosy, as we are led to believe by some? I have not seen the kind of analysis coming from Government circles, particularly the Department of Finance, which holds the purse strings, to know that this is unacceptable. We have come to shrug our shoulders at projects such as the Dublin Port tunnel, the Luas and the south-eastern motorway, which have had massive overruns, sometimes three times the original estimate. The national spatial strategy was introduced after the national development plan. No effort has been made to reconcile the two plans. Is the national spatial strategy, which is supposed to be a central part of the planning of this country's development, gelling with the national development plan? There has been no indication that national development plan projects have had to be reviewed because they did not fit in with the spatial strategy. It seems that everything has continued as before, even though the spatial strategy is supposed to inform our planning.

One wonders whether the only purpose served by the national spatial strategy is to provide jobs for planners. Is it really driving a change in the Government's thinking on the delivery of infrastructure? As I pointed out on Question Time last week, there is evidence that State bodies, such as the Department of Health and Children, are committing to build and open facilities which they cannot operate due to a lack of staff. Where is the source of that failure? Who is being held accountable for such bad planning? I do not see any evidence of accountability in that regard. I hope the Minister will investigate such issues and give answers to Deputies. We need to have an informed debate on such matters.

People are sniggering in the corner when the proposed strategic national infrastructure Bill is mentioned. The Taoiseach announced to IBEC that the legislation would resolve the delays and unacceptable practices which hinder the development of our infrastructure. The Bill has not seen the light of day because it is bogged down in a web of political infighting. This country's attempts to deliver public infrastructure are making it something of a laughing stock. We need to get to grips with such matters.

Ireland's competitiveness is coming under increasing pressure. A newspaper reported today that PricewaterhouseCoopers has downgraded its estimate of this country's growth because of its declining competitiveness. Many reports have indicated that decisions and processes which are controlled by the Government are causing our loss of competitiveness. We are at the bottom of the league table that compares infrastructural elements such as ports, motorways, broadband systems, energy infrastructure, telecommunications networks and waste disposal systems. Such matters are of great importance if we want Ireland to remain competitive, but we are struggling to do so. It appears that we are losing ground.

It is time for serious political responsibility to be taken for the maintenance of the central coherence of the national development plan. It is not acceptable for the Minister for Finance to reject continually in the House the ESRI's suggestion that there should be more central monitoring of the selection of projects. He insists instead that it is an issue for devolved Ministers. We have seen too much devolution of responsibility, which has led to excessively rosy interpretations and forecasts of how well projects will perform and how little they will cost. When such projects are finished, it transpires that they do not deliver the projected benefits and they exceed the projected costs. Someone needs to take control of this area. The Minister is better equipped than most and has the opportunity to do so.

The Minister and his Cabinet colleagues have undermined their credibility in respect of infrastructural projects like the Punchestown equestrian centre, stadium and campus Ireland and the electronic voting system, which were handled in a disastrous manner. Proper processes were discarded when such matters were being pursued because they were the pet projects of certain Ministers or the Taoiseach. It is not acceptable for such an approach to be taken. The Minister for Finance needs to take clear measures to stamp out such the unfortunate attitude to public money of some of his colleagues.

Will the Minister examine another issue that we debated on Question Time last week? This country once had systems in place to protect taxpayers and deliver value for money. Ireland was regarded for many years by other countries, such as the new emerging EU member states, as an example of a country that used the resources it received from the EU well. Our project evaluation and monitoring systems were good and moneys were spent prudently. It is commonly accepted by anyone outside the Government benches that the systems to which I refer have been allowed to rust.

Despite the figures quoted by the Minister, I believe that the findings last week of the expenditure review initiative reinforce the view that Ireland is no longer a leading country in its capacity to manage well the spending of public moneys on key infrastructure. Just 20 of 143 projects pursued under the most recent programme, between 2002 and 2004, have been completed. The Department of Finance has allowed the Department of Education and Science, for example, to resile on commitments to examine crucial matters such as the management of its building programme, its young offenders programme and its programme for children who are at risk of disadvantage in the education system.

There are huge question marks over our delivery of value for money in areas such as those I have mentioned. Officials in the Department of Finance apparently acquiesced in the parent Department's decision to abandon the examination of such issues. The Government has sold the pass on the expenditure review initiative, which it introduced on foot of criticism by the Comptroller and Auditor General. It has allowed the evaluation of crucial programmes such as those I have mentioned not to take place. The Government needs to change its policy in this regard by taking a tough stance on this issue.

As I said in my reply to the Budget Statement, Ministers have abandoned the notion that key performance indicators are driving the allocation of moneys within their Estimates. I asked Ministers to mention the performance indicators which are driving their Estimates, but they could not answer me. They could not tell me what the performance indicators are or what they are trying to achieve in certain areas. The strategic management initiative has produced significant volumes of paperwork, but it is not focusing people on targets or highlighting the performance indicators we might expect to be reflected in the spending of public money. It is not good enough. It is obvious that the strategic management initiative is driven by the Taoiseach more than by the Minister for Finance, but it has been driven into a cul-de-sac. We need proper monitoring of performance to ensure that money is following performance. The spending of money should be judged on the quality of outcomes.

I will not speak at length about benchmarking, in respect of which the Government has again sold the pass. We had a significant opportunity to drive reform agendas in crucial areas of the public service when extra pay worth €1.3 million was being made available. After that money had been spent, we suddenly seemed to discover a need to reform radically the prison and health systems, for example. Ministers were queueing up to highlight areas which were in need of radical reform, but they had stayed dumb when they had the money and the opportunity to drive the reform agenda forward.

The consequence of the problems I have mentioned has been a huge tax explosion. Not only did the Government spend money recklessly, particularly in the run-up to the previous general election, it also allowed proper controls and performance systems to rust over, leading to a surge in tax. It was clear in a recent debate I had with the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Deputy McDowell, that he is in denial about this development. He does not accept that the tax burden has doubled and that we are collecting more tax as a proportion of gross national product than we were in 1997. He believes his party introduced a period of cutting tax to generate growth, but that is not what happened. We have increased the tax take substantially in nominal terms. The average tax-paying household is paying €25,000 in tax each year. That represents an increase of €4,000 since the general election in 2002.

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