Kathleen Lynch (Cork North Central, Labour)

Exactly. While many of those people admire the economy, the same people are taken aback at what we have done with the boom and the fact that we still have an education system that is less than half way up the OECD table. I have heard that if someone were to land from Mars and walk into one of our overcrowded school prefabs or trolley-ridden accident and emergency departments, he or she might believe it was a Third World country. What has been done with the enormous boon that landed in the Government's lap is abysmal. We will regret it and the people will not be as forgiving as the backbenchers in Fianna Fáil.

This Government has been in power for the past ten years. It should have presided over an economy that created the type of services the country deserves, which, in fairness, we did not have the resources to put in place for a long time. However, we have had the resources for the past ten years, yet we have a health service that is not just inefficient and ineffectual but in some instances downright dangerous. One would be reluctant to have a surgical procedure in some hospitals. The register of people dying from hospital acquired infections in time will show us how reluctant we should have been and that should be taken into account.

People now decide where they are going to live based on what they can afford, not on where their families or the best services are located. Again, that is something the Government could have controlled, but it did not do so. They allowed matters let rip with the former Minister for Finance, Mr. Charlie McCreevy, effectively saying "party on". We have been brought to this state because of a lack of control over the economy and how services were put in place. There are now areas in the country that do not have sufficient spaces for children to go to school, despite the fact that young people get married and housing estates are built. It does not take a rocket scientist to realise that after children are born, they will need to go to school within a few years, yet we put enormous housing estates in place with no facilities and no transport systems, features normal developed communities expect. This did not happen at a time when the money was available to do it and that is outrageous. We can talk about a 3% growth rate being something the rest of the world envies. That is absolutely correct, but what they do not envy is our scandalous provision of services.

I want to tell the House what I was doing today for an hour and a half. I went from Billy to Jack in every Department that could possibly have anything to do with the provision of house alarms for the elderly. The Finance Bill is about growth rates, the super-economy, job creation, etc., but equally it is about the provision of services to the people. There are niggardly little cuts during budgets which are never seen until we go looking for something. The Government no longer funds alarms for the homes of the elderly, who now feel more insecure in their communities than they did five years ago. A scheme was in place, which was administered by the Department of Social Welfare, now the Department of Social and Family Affairs, but it has gone. It was hived off to the Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs and we all know what happens when things go there. They tend to disappear into the mire, off to an island somewhere or into the mists of time. It no longer exists. Elderly people are looking to have their houses alarmed and they cannot get this done now because that is one of the cuts.

As in all debates in this House we must always talk about our individual constituencies. Cork North Central lost a seat in the last reshuffle by the commission because its population is down. Everyone accepts this; that is the way of the world — it is how the Constitution is written. It lost that seat because the population does not exist to support five Dáil Deputies and because it does not have the infrastructure to support the population. It is as simple as that. Cork North Central and Cork South Central have always been extremely good to Fianna Fáil. However, Fianna Fáil in this Government has not been good to Cork and particularly to Cork North Central. It does not have a ring road, which is needed for access. It does not have the rehabilitation unit which was promised for the site of St. Mary's orthopaedic hospital nearly eight years ago. Every public representative can confirm that he or she gets phone calls at least three times a year from people whose loved ones are waiting on a bed at Dún Laoghaire rehabilitation hospital but cannot get one because they are not available. We desperately need another unit, in the south of the country, but it has not happened.

There is not a penny, paragraph or bullet point in the Finance Bill about the future of the docklands project in Cork. The Dublin Docklands Authority has been in place for the past ten years, and longer. I believe the rainbow Government put it in place, but there is nothing for the docklands in Cork, which is pivotal as regards how the city develops. There is no light rail system to the airport. Indeed, there is no relief for the airport in fulfilment of the promise made by a Minister in writing — which is quite unusual for this Government. He promised that when Cork Airport disconnected from the Dublin Airport Authority, it would be debt-free. All of a sudden that could not happen, but by that time the election was over and there was a change of Minister. It is pivotal for the development of Cork Airport that it disconnects from Dublin Airport Authority, but it cannot do so with the type of debt it now has to carry, yet there is not one word. Surely the Government must realise that the imbalance that has occurred in this country is the result of lack of development and investment in areas outside Dublin.

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