Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

Clearly, Fianna Fáil is preoccupied with envelopes, but is not doing much in terms of delivering infrastructure.

In the Estimates, many Ministers, including the Tánaiste, were not spending up to 20% of their capital budgets. The hand-back and roll-over with regard to capital budgets in the Book of Estimates is €285 million. That is astonishing when one thinks of the roads and public transport we have not got. The Minister for Health and Children, Deputy Harney, rolled over €56 million in capital on the health Estimate, which is extraordinary.

This year we had the tragedy in the hospital in Cavan-Monaghan. Last year we talked at this time on "Morning Ireland" about the trolley watch. As my colleague, Deputy Bruton said, it is very sad — and gives me no pleasure to say — that this week, the Irish Nurses Organisation has reported that the number of people on trolleys is unfortunately somewhat higher than it was at the budget weekend this time last year. In this past weekend, there were 359 people on trolleys.

The delivery record of the Government in terms of infrastructure is truly pathetic. Transport 21 consists of five pages, two of which are maps. Another page is a wish list in which we are told many new services will be available in ten years' time, in 2015, presumably just in time for the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. The floor of the Taoiseach's office must be littered with brave new world strategies launched with bravado over the years, something akin to the great leaps forward that used to take place in Russia. We have decentralisation, the national spatial strategy, the health strategy, the road safety strategy, the suicide prevention strategy, the national climate change strategy and so on. I do not know whether there was a strategy on electronic voting — I cannot recall whether that was called a strategy.

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