Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

The examples of Government waste are too numerous to go into great detail, although my colleagues will refer to many of them, but I want to elaborate on three examples.

The medical cards for over 70s scheme was announced to great applause from Government benches in the budget of 2001 and welcomed on all sides of this House. What Deputies did not know, however, was the secretive and ham-fisted planning behind the proposal. It was politically motivated to win votes at the expected election a few months later. There were no negotiations with the doctors, no proper costings and not even a proper study of the number of recipients. The cost of the medical card bonanza jumped from an estimated €19 million to an estimated additional annual cost of €51 million.

As the months passed it became necessary to offer a blank cheque to the doctors to implement the policy. The Taoiseach, Deputy Ahern, is no stranger to blank cheques. Blank cheques are what he does best. Blank cheques to his former master is what got him where he is today. There was no problem for him, therefore, in writing another blank cheque to get the matter sorted out before the 2002 election.

The second example I want to examine is the National Roads Authority primary routes improvement scheme. The national development plan proposed investment of €5.6 billion on national roads improvement works in the period 2000 to 2006. By mid-2002, however, the reported estimated cost of completing the national roads improvement programme had jumped to €15.6 billion. Furthermore, a major part of the programme will not be delivered in the period ending in 2006.

Building roads is a worldwide activity. The Romans did it. Every possible eventuality has already been encountered in other countries. We are familiar with many countries that have 50 and 60 years' experience of the mass construction of national road and motorway networks, including Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and so on. Everything the Irish Government needs to know about managing a national road-building programme is easily available to it from neighbouring European states. There is no excuse, therefore, for the overspend on the roads programme. It is incompetence or worse.

When the Comptroller and Auditor General examined the reasons behind the cost increase in the national roads improvement programme, he identified inflation as accounting for 40%, 25% was due to underestimation of costs at the beginning of the programme, 16% was due to a systematic failure to cost certain elements of the schemes at the planning stages and 20% was due to changes in the scope of projects and new works, with the balance accounted for by large increases in the estimated cost of high profile projects such as the Dublin Port tunnel and the south-eastern section of the M50.

The report by the Comptroller and Auditor General noted that the lack of realistic estimates was the main problem. By the time of the adoption of the national development plan, cost estimation had not even been properly developed in the NRA. A cost estimation function was only employed for the first time in 2000, therefore, the NRA had no dedicated in-house expertise to determine or validate the cost of projects until that date. The audit by the Comptroller and Auditor General established that overall, the final cost in these cases averaged out at a startling 42% more than the amount on which tender acceptance was based.

We have a specialist Department of Transport that appears unable to learn the lessons of project management in other countries. Irish people who travel abroad are used to envying public transport systems in Madrid, Stockholm and even in countries we regard as less developed. Irish people appear to have wearily accepted that our Government has neither the intention nor the ability to plan and implement a good public transport system.

I want to refer to the indemnity deal agreed with the religious institutions. The initial estimate of the potential liability was €258 million. That figure has been shown to be hopelessly far out; the latest estimates are from €610 million up to €1 billion. The Government decision on the establishment of the redress scheme was essentially a political fix. It was informed by estimates of the scale of the likely claims load by the Department but the Department, as the papers have shown, did not have the data to estimate the ultimate liability.

The Committee of Public Accounts has found that in terms of the negotiations with the religious congregations, the State negotiating team had no prior knowledge of the ability of the congregations to pay the contribution expected. The State adopted a 50:50 negotiating position in regard to sharing the cost of redress but ultimately the State team caved in and settled for far less than its original aim. The congregations initially offered a mere €50 million to €60 million and when that was rejected by the Minister, he ended up settling for a mere €128 million.

The weakness of the Government's position in its negotiations with the congregations led the Committee of Public Accounts, which is made up of Deputies from all parties, to make the near-absurd conclusion that: "The strength of the State's negotiating team should be equal, at all times, to that of those with whom they are negotiating". That is a sad commentary on public service management in this country. There should be no need to make such an obvious statement concerning the competence and responsibility of those representing the State in important negotiations. All too often, however, this Government is allowing the citizens of this State to be consistently out-smarted by better organised interest groups and we are paying the price for our Government's incompetence.

There are two main failings of Government — lack of competence and lack of accountability. Since 2001, expenditure reviews have been introduced for minor programmes but not for the major programmes in health services, education or social welfare. The continental European concept of structured organisational learning from past performance is virtually absent from the main Irish public services. We do not have the sense of an institutional memory in terms of what we got right, what we got wrong and what we learn from the past. To compound the problem, managers and senior managers do not have the necessary management and technical skills to run large specialist or complex services that aim to deliver services.

In an earlier simpler world, it may have sufficed for public officials with a generalist education to run sections of the civil or public service but it does not suffice today. Furthermore, Ministers do not have expert advisers. Instead, they appoint spin-doctors and PR companies to either explain away or hide the mistakes. In many European countries, a Minister responsible for a public service Department typically recruits expert advisers in that field to work in the ministerial office, and that is in addition to the many specialist experts already working in the permanent civil service.

In the Irish public service, where high quality managers with good qualifications and experience have been recruited from outside the Irish public system, they have left both the organisation and the country after a short tenure because of the difficulty of working with the Irish public administrative system. There are a number of very well known examples.

There is a competence deficit not only at technical and managerial level but also at the top level of political leadership. There is a question mark over the competence and suitability of many Ministers to give political direction to major Departments. Deputies Cowen and Martin, who both served as Ministers with responsibility for health, have fine qualities but one must wonder if they were capable of getting to grips with the complex governance issues of the health service. Deputy Cowen made no secret of his anxiety to depart the "Angola brief" for another Department as soon as the Taoiseach would sign his release papers. Deputy Martin has defended his ministerial performance robustly but his overall record is very disappointing.

A culture of full accountability and responsibility is absent from the current political system. The disgraceful refusal of former Minister for Health and Children, Deputy Martin, to accept any responsibility for the illegal nursing home charges is just a particularly glaring example. This culture comes from the Ministers and permeates right down to the permanent public service. Nobody is held fully accountable, nobody is fired and rarely are officials identified as being responsible for incompetence.

In summary, this Government is neither able nor willing to reform the Government and administrative systems to get better levels of service to the public from the taxes the public pay. We need a Dáil body to oversee the management of public service delivery at a reasonable cost. Public servants are big losers from Government mismanagement. Their hard work and dedication is often not properly utilised and frequently goes unappreciated by the general public when the public are frustrated by a badly organised and badly managed system. We all lose from Government mismanagement and incompetence.

The Irish public is forced to accept inferior and inadequate levels of public services because the Government cannot manage. The Forfas annual competitiveness report for 2004 shows Ireland 15 out of 16 countries in terms of overall infrastructure, transport infrastructure, ports, communications infrastructure, energy infrastructure and 14 out of 15 countries in terms of broadband access. These failures in competitiveness arising from lack of infrastructure cost the economy dearly and as the Minister knows, they deter direct foreign investors into this country.

How much of our knowledge of the overspending is due to freedom of information and the Freedom of Information Act? We know about the Abbotstown fiasco because of the operation of that Act. We know about the breakdown in the relationship between the former Minister for Finance, Mr. Charlie McCreevy, and the former Minister for Health and Children, Deputy Micheál Martin, because of FOI. We would not understand half as much as we do now about the shambles that is our medical service and health system without FOI. We have a much clearer picture of the mismanagement of the Luas project through the use of FOI.

No wonder the Government saw fit to fillet the FOI Act. This filleting has without a doubt significantly reduced public and media insight into spending and project management in Departments. We must both reinstate the Freedom of Information Act and establish powers of oversight by the Oireachtas of this Government's spending. Otherwise it will continue to spend like a drunken sailor.

The Minister's response on behalf of the Government to the Labour Party motion is pathetic and includes a list of management words. The Government will have targeted reforms, modernisation of the system of public procurement, new guidelines for the appraisal and management of capital expenditure programmes and rolling multi-annual capital envelopes for better management. We have heard it so often before and I am afraid this Government has not been able to produce.

The former Minister for Finance, Mr. Charlie McCreevy's, big idea for reform three years ago this month was the national development finance agency. Can anyone even remember? Mr. McCreevy rushed the NDFA Act through the Oireachtas at the behest of the Taoiseach as the answer to inefficiency in infrastructure building. In fact, the NDFA has been a flop and a waste of public money.

Recently it was forced to disengage from the PPP upgrade of the M50 because of a conflict of interest with the National Pension Reserve Fund, which is supporting a private sector bidder for the second phase of the upgrade. Why did the Government not identify this problem when it concocted the NDFA idea?

We are all aware of the closeness between Fianna Fáil and the construction industry. Is this extraordinary closeness one of the reasons for short-changing the taxpayer time and again on construction projects? There is more than one way of skinning a cat. While we hope that the era of brown envelopes is over, who is to say that the extraordinary amount of socialising and shmoozing that takes place between the parties of Government and big business blurs the critical faculties of Ministers when it comes to assessing value for money on public contracts.

The Government, in its response, seems indifferent to value for money for the taxpaying public. If the Government had got spending and management of infrastructure right, Dublin could have a public transport system not necessarily on a par with Madrid but perhaps comparable to Budapest, Lisbon or a range of European cities with which we might reasonably compare ourselves, or even expect to be better than.

Without a doubt our children would be in smaller classes as promised by this Government three years ago and the current backlog of new and refurbished schools would have been met. I am sure the Minister is aware that in parts of my constituency the first phone call made when parents bring a new baby home is to find out how to get the child into a primary school four years later, such is the shortage of primary school places.

I smiled yesterday when I heard the Taoiseach promise to fight the flab and eliminate obesity. I do not know if he was talking about Government spending. Is he aware that in many newer areas the Department of Education and Science is now building three storey schools on sites that have been reduced from the standard five acres to three acres? Is he aware that routinely there is little access to gym or sports activities in many schools because there are no facilities? In parts of Dublin the ban on playground running around arises from overcrowding and not primarily from insurance based fears.

If we spent money properly, trolleys in hospitals would be for short-term emergency cases and not the semi-permanent beds they have become. Perhaps the health service would have seen innovations common in other countries, such as rural helicopter-based emergency medical services.

Many women throughout Ireland are still without access to the BreastCheck service, not due to lack of money but rather to our old friends' incompetence and lack of ministerial direction.

Many elderly people enter nursing homes far earlier than they otherwise might because they cannot obtain State funding for home supports to make their homes more user-friendly in their advancing years.

In my constituency, one of the cost overruns that is most galling to people is the purchase, for €30 million, of a site for a prison at Thornton in north County Dublin, when similar farms were available from €4 million to €6 million. This public money, this largesse by the Minister, Deputy McDowell, could have been used to fund primary schools and leisure facilities for growing local communities in Blanchardstown and Swords. Instead, however, the beneficiaries of Government largesse are, yet again, land owners and speculators.

The list of projects short-changed, infrastructure and essential services denied goes on and on. These cost overruns have not only meant infrastructure arriving late and poorly delivered, but they have also denied us much infrastructure that the rest of our EU partners now take for granted. It really is time for the Government to go.

I wish to share time with Deputy Shortall and Deputy Quinn.

See this speech in context