Noel Treacy (Galway East, Fianna Fail)

With respect to the House, to the Leas-Cheann Comhairle and to Deputy Allen I rephrase my sentence. This is far cry from the €5 million claimed by Deputy Allen, which is nothing short of a fabrication. The Deputy knows that the €4.76 million referred to in the Comptroller and Auditor General's report for recurring costs in the main applies to the purchase of state-of-the-art passport booklets which feature specialised data pages capable of holding digital photographs and other information vital for passport security and fraud prevention. That is the cost of safeguarding our passports' credibility and providing the potential to build in additional security and anti-fraud features and any reasonable person would accept that.

This debate underlines the Fine Gael tactic of shifting base lines to vastly exaggerate over-spending, to the detriment of the State, its systems and officers for naked political opportunism. It is part of a political tactic to project that party's own record of fiscal incompetence on to this Government. Fine Gael has no fiscal spine and is not tenable in the long-term. It is the party which brought us a 27% rise in hospital waiting lists, an 11% fall in local authority housing output, a £1.80 rise in the old aged pension, the Eircom shareholder compensation plan and the taxi driver compensation plan. It will never be the party of fiscal propriety.

See this speech in context