Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

The fates seem to conspire to undo this Government. Every time Ministers have a dramatic announcement to make and billions to wave around they are met with yawns of boredom by a cynical public that has heard it all before. Last week was no different when the Book of Estimates was published. Barely a day's wonder and along comes Roy Keane to knock it off the news. Which would one prefer to read about, Roy's rows or Brian's billions? There is no contest in terms of news value. We are witnessing a bonfire of Fianna Fáil vanities and, for occasional diversion, a small sideshow from a junior partner that cannot decide just yet whether it wants to contest the election with the Government or the Opposition. It is the curse of Janus, the Roman god with a double-faced head, each looking in opposite directions.

The Book of Estimates is a chronicle of wasted chances and hardly a line is original. It is another dose of promises made time and again, for more gardaí, more teachers, more medical cards, all announced so often before and with ever increasing fanfares but as worthy of credibility as an Al Capone declaration of innocence.

The American journalist Walter Litman wrote that a credibility gap is a result of a deliberate policy of artificial manipulation of official news. This Government has overdosed on this type of artificial manipulation of news by announcing the same thing so often and packaging it as something new. All we have, however, are promises made and forgotten. For example, Fianna Fáil said in the general election campaign it would cut class sizes for all children under nine years of age to 20 or less. I will put a simple question to the Minister for Finance, Deputy Cowen and the Minister for Education and Science, Deputy Hanafin. Are we any closer to that target after last week's Estimates for the Department of Education and Science and the indicative falls in class size numbers? In Blanchardstown many classes are close to 40, the largest number of super-sized classes in the country. There is not the remotest chance that all children under nine will be in classes of 20 by the next election. It was a cynical promise, which they were aware of when they made it but, true to form, they made it and broke it. True to form they also think they can resurrect it and present it as something new and bold when it is nothing more than an old promise reheated and rehashed under a new shiny label.

In the overblown health strategy, waiting lists would be gone by 2004 and there would be 200,000 full medical cards. The result has been an appalling vista that on its own merits electoral defeat. Countless billions have been spent with little to show. As for the promised billions for Transport 21, Ministers might not know but last week saw unprecedented delays on the M50, with traffic jams stretching every morning, afternoon and evening from the toll bridge to Santry in one direction and back to Templeogue in the other. The M50 is beginning to resemble one of Dante's circles of hell, yet the permanent civil service, in the person of the Secretary General of the Department of Transport, told the Committee of Public Accounts just a week ago it would be years before electronic tolling or other improvements to the gridlock will come about. In the meantime this week's misery will get worse when the upgrade to the road starts next year and an estimated 7,900 lorries hit the M50 and the toll bridge every day. Needless to remark, Transport 21, for all its billions of taxpayers money to spend has nothing to say about the toll bridge in its five little pages with a miserable map which even had Dublin's topography wrong.

The public spending Estimates for 2006 prove beyond doubt that this is a tax and spend Government. It would not be so bad if taxpayers got value for money but often they do not. The Government has been in power for eight and a half years and has done little of significance to ensure the efficiency and effectiveness of big spending Departments like the Department of Health and Children, the Department of Education and Science and the Department of Social and Family Affairs. As a result people are frequently subjected to wholly inadequate levels of public service. At least in Angola or elsewhere in Africa people might be treated with human decency, in contrast to a three-day wait on a trolley.

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