Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

The tragedy, of course, is that it is not just these manifesto promises that will be broken once again. We have seen it time and again from this Government. The tragic truth is that if the economy continues to be managed the same way the Minister is managing it today in this budget, we will quickly be unable to afford the investment in infrastructure that we need. We will see serious threats to this economy emerge if he continues with this approach.

We need reform in the way public money is spent. We needed it seven years ago. Even now, it would be welcome but there is no serious reform being delivered here. This Minister has spurned the opportunity of reform every time it has been presented to him. He spurned it when benchmarking was there, a huge €1.3 billion increase which could have leveraged change. He spurned it most recently when his own big pay increases were coming up for scrutiny when he could have demanded performance before they would be paid to senior managers.

He failed to bring in the sort of scrutiny that the Committee of Public Accounts recommended to this House in a very good report less than two years ago. He has failed to bring in that scrutiny because he is afraid to see people scrutinise the way public money is spent. He has run away from that measure, which could have leveraged reform.

Instead, he has taken the easy option. In the last period when this Government was in office, it created 178 new agencies. This is the sort of new outsourced Government that is unaccountable. They all have their own public relations and human relations departments, as well as their own glossy annual reports and personalised Christmas cards. We will see them all flowing in during the next few weeks. However, they are not delivering value and need to be rationalised. Many of them duplicate work done elsewhere. We need serious change.

It is not good enough for Ministers to join the solemn chorus of calls for wage restraint and reform when they are like the army generals sitting in their armchairs way back behind the line asking others to go over the top into machine gun fire. When it comes to their comforts, there will be no change.

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