Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)

This Labour Party Private Members' motion is the last of the Dáil term and the last of the parliamentary year in which the Dáil met for 95 days, 55 days fewer than our neighbouring Parliament at Westminster. It has been the hallmark of this Taoiseach to contrive as few sitting days as the Government can get away with. No Ministers are more anxious to see the shutdown of the Dáil than the Tánaiste and the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, who, for all their high-minded pledges on this side of the House, readily acquiesce now in the abridged Dáil year.

I am pleased to share my time with Deputy Kenny, leader of Fine Gael, and to share sponsorship of this motion with Fine Gael. The substance of the motion deserves the support of other parties in Opposition and of Independent Members. If Fianna Fáil backbenchers were genuine about this Government having lost its way, they too would support our motion.

This motion focuses on the issues that have caused such upset to the Government backbenchers. It is the neglect and mishandling by the Government of these same issues that has caused such electoral panic to rage on the Government backbenches.

We have tabled this motion because we believe this to be an arrogant, tired and fractured Administration. It has lost initiative and coherence and has descended into aimless drift. It is out of touch and out of time. Although it may seek to linger for another year, like a crowd outside a closing pub who cannot go anywhere else, the country will be ill-served by that year.

It will be ill-served and significantly damaged by a Government whose record is one of using the public purse to buy votes. Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats are prepared to put our economic prosperity at risk to stay in power. They did it in 2001 and 2002. The fragilities in the economy are now more serious. The property spiral alone threatens to undermine a delicately balanced economy. A repeat of the reckless conduct coming up to the 2002 general election could be disastrous for the country and its people. An early general election would avoid that danger.

With Deputy Kenny, I believe that our country would be far better served by a general election and the return of an alternative Government, with a fresh mandate and the drive to bring about change. It would not just be a different Government, but a better Government. It would be a Government in touch with the needs of the people who get up at 6 a.m. to go to work or care for others. It would be a Government that would address the crisis in our hospitals and put gardaí working in the community, responsive to the community, and committed to the community. It would invest in families and children, and tackle the growing divide in society. In short, it would be a Government that would drive the changes that would make tomorrow better than today for hard-working families.

The people cannot afford another year of arrogance and drift, and the Exchequer cannot afford another bout of Fianna Fáil and Progressive Democrats vote buying. This motion lists a succession of Government misjudgments and disasters. Unfortunately, they are but a sample from a much longer list of failings. There are some common threads running through the selected issues.

There is a thread of arrogance and disconnection from the lives of real people, which saw €162 million lost on the PPARS system in the Department of Health and Children. That level of loss was described by a Minister, Deputy Noel Dempsey, as being "relatively very very small". To the people who get up at 6 a.m. to go to work and care for others, €162 million of their money is most certainly not small.

There is a thread of Progressive Democrat ideology, which afflicts more than half the Cabinet, and insists on doing irreparable damage to the health service by making it investor-led rather than patient-led. There is a thread of myopic conservatism which refuses to see the opportunities our new wealth brings us and insists on muddling along with old ways and in old mindsets.

It was once said of Seán Lemass that he told the people to mount their camels and their asses and he would lead them to the promised land. It was said of Jack Lynch that he told them to light a Camel and sit down on their asses because this was the promised land. It was said of Charles Haughey that he was raising the price of camels, kicking their asses and mortgaging the promised land.

The present Taoiseach has convinced himself that he, personally, has brought his people to the promised land, and that our duty is to thank him for it in perpetuity. The most recent example of this was last Wednesday when he finally intervened to reply to arguments raised by Deputy McManus on behalf of a small group of people infected by blood products supplied by a State body. The Taoiseach restricted his reply to complaining about the length of time he is detained in the Dáil.

The truth is the Taoiseach was the fortunate inheritor of an economy on the cusp of a boom. For all his incessant campaigning, he is strangely disconnected from the reality of most peoples' lives and whose ingratitude to himself he finds so disconcerting. Self-praise is no praise, but self-congratulation is positively dangerous, and this Government has succumbed to that delusional state.

In his daily 65 seconds on the airwaves, the Taoiseach yesterday criticised our motion for being what he termed as "badly drafted". By this, he apparently means that there is nothing there to praise the Government. He runs a Government which has quite simply failed to stay in touch with the realities of a country and a people that have changed beyond all recognition. Rather than address what those changes mean and respond to them, the Government has contented itself with being a cheerleader for its members. One can almost imagine pom-poms being handed out at Cabinet meetings.

I have just done an interview with the Minister for Arts, Sports and Tourism, Deputy O'Donoghue. He stated that a report came out today praising the initiative for electronic voting. There is no point in trying to argue with a man who states that black is white. We know the reality. The commission was chaired by a High Court judge and is comprised of eminent persons. Nothing more symbolises the waste, failure, arrogance and remoteness of this Government than the electronic voting debacle.

The promised land is a land of broken promises. In reality, the promised land is a place where most families, no matter how hard they work, struggle to get by. In the real Ireland, the promised land is a place where basic things do not function, and where a camel might well come in handy to get through the queue for the toll bridge in the morning.

This is a Government whose reference point, for every answer from the Taoiseach, is 1997. It is a Government now ten years out of date. This country is different now, and its people's expectations are different. There is a generation of people for whom 1997 might as well be 1897. They are right to think that way. Prosperity has wrought change, and we live in an Ireland that is more confident in its abilities. What it has not seen is confident or able Government. New stresses and strains have been thrown up by our new society to which the Government seems patently incapable of responding.

Our public services seem to be run on the assumption that prosperity is an aberration, rather than the norm. The public sector has been encouraged to run itself as a slightly adjusted, but essentially unchanged, version of its pre-Celtic tiger self. The old processes, the old mind sets and the old boundaries to attainment are still in place. To the self-confident, able and can-do Ireland, that simply is not good enough any more. The trail of wasted public money, and the incapacity of public services to respond to new needs, sits ill with a people who have proven their abilities on any stage one cares to name. It is also a source of endless frustration to the talented and dedicated public servants, who are ready to embrace change and who want to provide world-class public services.

The task of the next Government is to reform and renew the role of Government itself. We need public services that meet modern needs and aspirations. Our economy needs investment in the infrastructures and services demanded by the global knowledge-led market place. Our society needs a commitment to public service and public services that will restore and augment the public realm — that place in our lives where we meet each other as equal citizens. We will only achieve those things when we shift out of old mind sets, and adjust ourselves to the requirements and the possibilities of a prosperous country.

That is why Labour and Fine Gael have set out an ambitious agenda for public sector reform. In "The Buck Stops Here", we have outlined a series of proposals to address the problem of ministerially-driven wasteful spending, of which the e-voting fiasco is only one emblem. However, we go beyond that, setting out a reform agenda which will deliver, not just better value for money but better services.

Some of those changes will be difficult. They will require negotiated change in the public service, not least in opening up recruitment in senior grades, but they will be led by a Government with a strong commitment to public service and public services and with the ambition and vision to make the most of the opportunities our new wealth has brought us.

What we will not do is engage in the wanton destruction of the public service, in the form of the mindless decentralisation programme, driven only by short-term electoral panic. Negotiated planned decentralisation can and will make a contribution to balanced regional development. We will not make demands on others that we are not prepared to make on ourselves. We will develop and codify new structures of responsibility in the public service, but we will begin with applying the principle of accountability to ourselves. We will not hide from public scrutiny as the present Government so regularly does.

This Government has avoided such responsibility and scrutiny on every occasion. The Minister, Deputy Martin's absence without leave from the Department of Health and Children during the PPARS and nursing home debacles is only two examples; the Ministers' — Deputies Noel Dempsey and Cullen — feckless disregard for taxpayers' money thrown away on electronic voting is another. That each remains in Cabinet is a testimony to the contempt in which this Government holds the people who elected it.

They seem to hold each other in a fair bit of contempt also, particularly where the two Progressive Democrats Ministers are concerned.

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