Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael)

There will be no services. We live in a time when we cannot provide hospital services, including accident and emergency services, or adequate staffing for medical, surgical or general hospital beds. We cannot provide adequate staffing for schools, the health services generally and local authorities.

I would be interested to know where we will be in another four or five years if we continue in this way. Let us not cod ourselves but ask the salient question. For example, when we reduce revenue to the system, let us by all means take full credit, telling everyone that we will ease their burdens. However, let us also tell them that there is a down side to it and that the so-called coping classes referred to in recent weeks also need care and attention, retirement, hospital services and institutions at various times. Let no one forget that all members of Irish society, from whatever social and economic strata, are human. They will all have to rely on the kinds of services about which we are talking, unless they are superhuman.

I know that it is not easy to say that we will increase subventions, in which case all the private institutions will up their charges, absorbing the entire benefit. Notwithstanding all that, a means other than that now in use must be found to determine an equitable way of dealing with the extremely vexed situation of subventions and the entitlement that I believe everyone should have, since the notion that those with a property should render themselves homeless before receiving any help is crazy.

I know what people will say. For the site of an ordinary house in suburban Dublin, the going rate can now be €1 million to €5 million. However, we are living in cloud-cuckoo land, since that will not continue. No one should be in any doubt about that, and the farther that we go down that road, the nearer we approach the bubble bursting.

The Minister of State will remember the person in County Kildare who told me in 1980 — during a Fianna Fáil Government, which makes it worse — that he had lost IR£1 million within the previous 12 months.

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