Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

The Government has a great facility for raking in ever rising amounts of tax revenue from hard-pressed taxpayers, but in every budget it never fails to add more stealth taxes. That is its speciality. For example, the increases in medical charges announced by the Tánaiste, Deputy Harney, mean that the cost of a visit to an accident and emergency department will increase from €55 to €60. This will be a green light for general practitioners and consultants to increase their fees by a similar amount so that on the north and west side of Dublin, a single visit to a GP will rise from the current price range of between €45 and €50 to a new level of probably €50 to €55 per visit. A family above the medical card limit with two children suffering a winter 'flu episode may well end up spending more than €600 for a few visits each to the GP plus medication. There is hardly any country in the European Union where doctor's visits are as exorbitant as in Celtic tiger Ireland.

The Tánaiste and Minister for Health and Children is also raising the cost of public and private beds in hospitals. This again will provide a green light to health insurers to raise premiums further. The Government talks the headline talk of low tax rates for income and corporation taxes but the hidden stealth charges for absolute essentials such as medical insurance and GP fees are an enormous burden on ordinary families. The Government cannot live down the fact that more than half those who pay tax pay some or all of it at the 42% rate. In addition, people on the 42% rate, by and large, have no entitlements so they must have extensive costly private medical insurance.

The strongly growing economy has allowed the Government to raise significant amounts of tax revenue. The Celtic tiger has benefited most of us, especially in terms of lower unemployment and higher living standards. There are problems and many of these are due to Government mismanagement. These include many aspects of the health service, poor and inadequate public transport and hopelessly congested roads, especially for daily commuters.

There are two overall priorities for economic policy. One is to develop adequate strategies to ensure continued growth rates at similar levels to this year. This will not be easy and will require much more than continuing to follow the same sectoral strategies that have got the economy to where it is today. The economy has changed and so has the external economic environment.

The other priority is to develop better strategies to distribute the benefits of economic growth more evenly and efficiently. The rising economic tide has left many boats adrift. The booming economy has also led to many negative effects on quality of life for most people, even if overall most of us are better off. Sky high child care costs, traffic congestion, hours spent commuting, and €55 for a short GP visit are just some of the negative effects of our badly managed economic growth.

One of the numerous gaps in the Estimates is provision for a public sector pay deal for the second half of next year. In similar circumstances, previous Ministers for Finance have provided a round but significant sum for a successor pay agreement in the public sector. We must remember that public servants are subject, as much as anybody else, to rip-off Ireland and the astronomical costs of living people experience here.

A few years ago, the then Minister for Finance, Mr. McCreevy, made great play of introducing a multi-annual spending framework for capital spending. In fact, a bad situation has worsened. The amount of underspending by many key Departments has increased each year. The Tánaiste's Department of Health and Children underspent its capital budget by a full 10%, the maximum permitted capital roll-over, in her case €56 million. The overall underspend and roll-over was €285 million. With a crisis of capacity in many parts of the health service and many sick patients suffering mentally and physically on the Tánaiste's ubiquitous trolley system, she proves incapable of spending the capital budget allocated to her.

Within days of the ridiculous relaunch of some of the country's old transport plans, the Minister for Finance, Deputy Cowen, revealed that the Government's underspend in transport infrastructure has risen again in 2005. A total of €100 million was underspent in 2005. The suspiciously round figure of an even €100 million tells the accountant in me that this figure is dodgy. In the old days when one was looking for fraud — the Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs might know this——

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