Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael)

I was intrigued when Deputy O'Connor referred to the fact that he has never seen the Opposition give a standing ovation to the Minister for Finance. Perhaps we are not so emotional. I will agree that there was a general upswelling of emotion which resulted in what can only be regarded as an orgy of emotion when the Minister finished his speech last evening. That can only be compared to a scene from the film, "The Italian Job", which Members will recall.

The mastermind in the film was played by Noël Coward, who organised a heist from prison. When word got back to him that the job had been pulled off and the thieves were speeding away with the loot through the various escape roads in a mountainous area of Italy, there was a celebration back in the prison. Noël Coward descended slowly from the top of the staircase to the ground floor to the tumultuous applause of everybody. He got a standing ovation. Considering the film further, one recalls that the getaway truck was at this point perched precariously over the side of a precipice with the golden loot slipping around as it see-sawed back and forth. In the middle of it all, Michael Caine said "Hang on a moment, I've got a plan". There is a certain similarity between "The Italian Job" and what we have seen in the past 24 hours.

While I am on the issue of applause at budget time, I remind the Members opposite that on an occasion not so long ago, my poor old friend and colleague, former Deputy McCreevy, presented a budget in which he made a famous announcement on decentralisation. There was loud and prolonged applause from the audience on the other side of the House who rose to their feet and stomped and pawed the ground, but when the mountain laboured, it brought forth the usual mouse. I hope Members on the other side of the House do not lose the run of themselves but instead evaluate the budget in the proper way.

The first question which comes to mind is prompted by an inimitable Member opposite who said the budget was all give and no take. We must ask why it was all give. The answer, simply, is that what should have been given before was not. A quick look at the various groups in our society provides an adequate explanation as to why there was so much money in the coffers. If one considers the much vaunted housing situation, one finds there are still between 50,000 and 60,000 families on housing lists. Supplementary welfare is being paid to appease them because they cannot be housed. The problem could have been solved simply by spending money to build houses specifically for them, as used to be done once upon a time. That has not been done, however. Hospital waiting lists are another explanation for the amount of money which has been saved up. There is a lack of adequate health and psychiatric services, including child psychiatric services, and long waiting lists for services of every hue. The lists have been growing for the last ten years, but they have not been attended to. If one wants to know how the Government has so much money to spend, examining how much it should have spent already on health services will give one food for thought.

In the education sector, one must ask how many schools are dilapidated or in need of extension. How many new schools are required and how long have we been waiting for action? How long have we been waiting for a reduction in class sizes while we continue to have one of the worst pupil-teacher ratios in the world? Why in five years has no one on the Government benches risen up in rebellion to demand that education be made a priority? Nothing has been done. A mother came to see me last Saturday whose child needs speech and language therapy. Her child was diagnosed two years ago, but there is still no sign of treatment, nor will there be in the next 12 months. They may have to wait a further two years. Early detection and treatment is important if a child is not to lag behind in his or her academic progress in later years. The failure to provide the services that child needs is another reason money has been saved up to be given away in a blatant attempt to buy votes in the next general election.

The people are alert to the Government's tactic. They might have bought it a few years ago as they bought the famous gimmick in 1977 when the motto was "Put more money in people's pockets", despite the fact that Europe had just emerged from an oil crisis. The Opposition of the day, whose party now sits on the Government side, decided it would go all out and abolished car tax. The result was potholes and plenty of them. The entire local government finance system and national road network were ruined, but as if that did not suffice, Fianna Fáil decided also that it would abolish rates. Why not go the whole hog and abolish everything? The result was more broken down services and a local authority system which could not meet its payments. After four very difficult years for the people of this country who had been told there was a better way and that more money in people's pockets would be the order of the day, the incoming Government elected in June 1981 had to produce a supplementary budget within 28 days of taking office. There was no money to pay civil servants, teachers or Garda or Army wages. When I hear the Members opposite crowing about how well they have done in the last couple of years and taking credit for addressing the economy, I have to smile.

For my sins, I spent a great deal of time as a member of the Committee on European Affairs where my attention was caught in the early days by the Common Fisheries Policy and its likely effect on Ireland. When I joined the committee, we had a fairly healthy fishing industry. It may do no good to say that various domestic interests undermined the industry to the extent that it has almost disappeared, but the fact is that we no longer have a coastal fishing sector. It has almost completely closed down. One can travel around the coast from Killybegs to Carlingford and find that it is closing. In a few years, we will no longer be able to get the famous Irish delicacy smoked salmon as we used to know it, which will be a terrible thing for the socialists on the Government side. We can blame who we like, but the people on the other side of the House were part and parcel of the negotiations at European level which allowed this to happen. The Common Fisheries Policy was a matter for them. It is no good to say that stocks are down when the question is why that has happened.

Reference has been made in this debate to agriculture. Among the claims which emerged from the last reform of the CAP was that there was great hope for Irish agriculture, but when I heard the phrase "rural development programme", I knew we were coming to the end. The reality for agriculture, on which the Members opposite have been negotiating for years, in Ireland and in Europe is that we will increasingly import food into a food producing country. We will import our food from Australia, New Zealand, Africa and Latin America, which will do a great deal for the ozone layer and carbon emissions. We will not produce food here because it will not be profitable. The sugar beet industry provides the classic example of how something can be allowed to slip away. How totally negligent the Government was to allow that to happen while at the same time other countries in Europe were considering how to convert the industry to produce something else that is now required, such as bio-fuels. An agreement was reached on the compensatory package, a huge amount of which went to the food processing company involved. It will move out of the country at the first opportunity and sell off the property assets it has here, which it got from the State, from the Irish Sugar Company. If producers continued to produce sugar, they would get no compensation, which is extraordinary.

There are two food producing areas that are critical to this country which has a climate eminently suited to food production. It is amazing that we should let them be negotiated away from us in the context of CAP reform, which the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, Deputy Roche, mentioned in a laudatory fashion of his efforts to the effect that CAP reform was very beneficial to the environment. I am sure the Minister of State sitting opposite is saying to himself "What the hell did he do that for?" I presume he thought fewer animals would mean less methane gas generation from the national herd, which would be beneficial to the ozone layer and the reduction in carbon emissions. I ask somebody to do the calculations when compared with the carbon emissions from all the imports that will be needed as a result. That applies not only to this country but also to the rest of Europe. However, the sugar beet industry in France has not disappeared. Miraculously it kept it on board. In parts of Britain it has also been retained because those countries are wise. Our negotiators did not do such a great job there.

The supply of health services is an emotive issue. People need to get treatment when it is required. There is no sense in promising treatment in a year or even six months. There may not be time to wait. It may be necessary and urgent that the treatment be provided now. During the stewardship of the Government 35,000 extra employees have been brought into the delivery of health services. While I do not know whose idea that was, it took place immediately after the former Minister for Health and Children said that he had identified a problem with the health boards which were wasting the money. We now have a single health board for the entire country which cannot and will not work, as Members opposite who were members of local authorities will know. It is impossible to administer on the ground to an area that is as widely dispersed as our health board area now is from Donegal to Kerry to Wexford and up again to Carlingford. I suppose that on examination at some future time it will mend its ways. That is why Deputy Ned O'Keeffe said it was all give — everything had been taken beforehand.

I wish to discuss the communications area of my portfolio. If as much money was floating around the country as is professed, why, in God's name, was nothing done to keep us at the leading edge of modern telecommunications and technology? We were either first or second in the European league. We are now either second last or last in a bigger group in the European league. While that took considerable imagination, effort and neglect, we have arrived at that point regardless of whether we like it. Sadly when we are trying to attract business and industry to the country and when we are trying to pretend we are at the leading edge in technology, we have allowed this to happen. Needless to say we had our flirtation with electronic voting. While I know the population has increased, I did not think it had increased by so much that we could no longer count the people's votes manually at election time. The Government decided to get rid of almost €60 million in the daftest idea I have ever heard. Anybody who spends time in this House could think of many other ways in which the money could be used.

I wish to mention what was the subject matter of the Private Members' debate this week. During the same term of stewardship, we have seen the demise of at least 500 post offices which were the backbone of the postal service network and which provided more ancillary services to the local rural and urban communities than anyone has yet assessed. Sadly the Government had originally intended to allow the postal services to wither on the vine and perhaps we would have replaced them with something else. There will be a change of Government some time and we will address that issue.

The energy area is also in the portfolio for which I am responsible. Amazing things have happened in this area which are amusing. To contradict everybody else in the world we decided to increase gas and electricity prices in the past six months. All the indicators were that it should have gone in the opposite direction and there was absolute silence from Government while the Opposition raised questions. We could not raise questions in the House because it was a matter exclusively for the regulator. Lo and behold, when the Minister went to Hanoi he must have spoken on a tannoy because it was reported that the Minister, Deputy Noel Dempsey, had recently met the chairmen and chief executives of both the ESB and Bord Gáis Éireann when the proposed tariff increases were announced by the regulator, and that he had urged both to review the need for the increases being proposed and to explore ways of minimising them in the interests of the consumers.

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