Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)

——at the behest of the Green Party councillors and with my strong casting vote, for which they were very grateful at the time. The Minister should not suggest that we are not committed to energy conservation. We have the record to prove it.

I understand that Ministers will have to adjust their budgets. The world does not work in 12 month accountancy periods and from time to time Ministers will have to make budgetary adjustments, which I accept. However, I cannot accept plans to remove €10 million from the provision for broadband. It seems the Minister is not so much the Minister for energy and communications as the Heineken Minister, the Minister for green energy who, perhaps, is not that interested in communications.

The MANs were mentioned earlier. The MANs are a disgrace. I do not know how much the Minister has spent on the MANs. I have been given different figures — €65 million, €90 million — but as far as I can understand approximately €90 million has been spent on 65 towns with only two, three or four customers. The amount of money that has been wasted on the MANs is a disgrace on the level of PPARS.

We need proper leadership on broadband from the Government. The MANs scheme is not working and because of that we are falling behind. We are far behind other countries in terms of broadband services. We even falsify our statistics by including mobile broadband with fixed broadband, which we should not do. In fixed broadband, which is what matters, we are behind Slovakia and Hungary and because of that we are losing competitiveness and foreign direct investment and we will be behind the pack yet again when it comes to next generation networks. The Minister does not appear to care about that or understand it. The fact that he is prepared to take €10 million off the budget concerns me and people in business and enterprise. I am concerned that the Minister is contributing directly to our falling competitiveness and our fall-off in foreign direct investment.

This is also another example of bad Government planning, financial unaccountability, overspending and, once again, the making of financial commitments by Government agencies which they then cannot fulfil. We have to draw a line at some point and no longer tolerate agencies overspending or entertain Ministers who come in here looking for more money because they have not planned their budgets.

I refer particularly to Deputy Coveney's comments about the Health Service Executive. The Minister, Deputy Mary Harney, says the HSE must stay within its budget yet on the other wing of the Government a Minister is saying that agencies can overspend their budgets and that money can be taken off the provision for infrastructure. In addition, the Minister for Finance, Deputy Cowen, says the one area he will not cut is infrastructure. Three wings of the Government appear to be flying in different directions and as a result the people are being let down, the taxpayer is being ripped off and the country will lose out as a result.

There is hypocrisy and a lack of direction from the Government. Fianna Fáil is committed to infrastructure. The Green Party Ministers want to cut infrastructure to bail out overspending agencies and the Progressive Democrats want to make agencies stay within their budgets. That is not a Government. It is some sort of camel ragtag coalition that does not deserve to sit on the opposite side of the House. The Minister is undermining broadband and infrastructure, which will cost us in the long term. This is another example of Government overspending and mismanagement.

Given what I have heard today and from other speakers, it may be necessary for Fine Gael to take a stand on this issue. We will not let the Minister paint us as being opposed to greener home schemes because we are not. The Minister is the one who mismanaged the scheme, the one who had it slimmed down. We are standing up for consistency in Government, proper planning and investment in infrastructure.

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