Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)

I am glad to have the opportunity to bring this motion before the House. It is the second motion relating to the information society that Fine Gael has introduced in Private Members' time in the space of four months. That speaks for itself and shows our concern at the Government's lack of priority, in particular regarding the telecommunications infrastructure in Ireland, and the Government's attitude to the potential for e-Government.

In early 1999, the Government launched an action plan to progress the creation of an information society in Ireland. The big idea was to plan for, fund and implement a strategy that would dramatically increase computer usage and information technology generally among the general public and private businesses in a way that would be safe and cost effective on-line. Public and Government services would be provided primarily on-line, to improve ease of access and to allow for interaction between service providers in local authorities and Departments and the public in a way that would utilise modern technology to increase efficiency and drive down costs.

The first Government series of actions on e-Government was for the period from 1999 to 2001 and it aimed at developing an adequate telecommunications infrastructure, that is, the national availability of broadband, as well as developing services on-line. That first attempt by the Government to develop Ireland's capacity for e-governance was quickly followed by a new strategy called New Connections, launched in March 2002, to cover the period from then until 2005. New Connections was to build on the first action plan and to develop a more ambitious strategy for delivering services on-line to the public and to facilitate inter-agency and interdepartmental work on-line.

The year 2005 came and went and the time period for New Connections ended, yet we have had no follow-up plan or strategy, or even an internal evaluation of the previous strategy. The Comptroller and Auditor General was right to call it as it is when he said:

The momentum towards developing e-Government that was evident in the early years of the decade appears to have faded somewhat. This is evident in the absence of a formal e-Government strategy since the beginning of 2006.

Two years later we are still waiting, although there are some signs that something is coming down the tracks.

The motion by Fine Gael is aimed at refocusing minds on what can be achieved through a new, ambitious e-Government programme and a plan of action. During Question Time this afternoon, the Minister of State, Deputy Tom Kitt, announced that a new strategy for e-Government would be launched by the end of July. I welcome that and it shows this motion is timely. I hope that it will influence the attitude towards that new strategy. However, what is needed in preparation for the new strategy is an honest assessment of our performance on e-Government strategies to date, a recognition of what has worked and what has not worked, what represents value for money and what does not. In other words, we need to learn from mistakes made in the past, some of which were very expensive indeed.

Unfortunately, from what I have heard this afternoon, I have real concerns about whether the Government, in particular the Department of the Taoiseach, accepts valid criticisms of its own performance in e-Government projects to date. When commenting on the Comptroller and Auditor General's report on e-Government, the Minister of State said: "The report acknowledges that there have been many successful projects which, when compared with other countries, points to Ireland being exceptional in the high level of success that has been achieved." This statement could hardly be further from the truth, and points to a false assessment of our performance on e-Government to date. The facts are quite clear.

The Comptroller and Auditor General acknowledged, as does Fine Gael, that there were some successful projects, which need to be recognised and built upon. However, its overall assessment was very critical. Among its key findings are the following. Out of a total of 161 projects included in the e-Government strategy, only 74 were completed and are fully live as planned, 44 were partly implemented, 23 were abandoned entirely — I will come back to that in a minute — and 20 were labelled "status not known". That is some leadership. According to figures supplied by implementing Departments, there was on average a 25% time overrun in projects, while projects ran an average of 20% over budget. The total cost of the strategy to the taxpayer is officially €420 million, but that is not the whole cost of the strategy. Many of the internal staffing costs for putting together e-Government strategies within Departments are not factored into the overall cost.

The flagship project of the e-Government plan is the creation of a public service broker. In normal English, this is a one-stop shop where people can log on to www.reachservices.ie and they should be able to access all Government services on-line. It was estimated that this project would cost €14 million, but to date it has cost €37 million and the ongoing cost of running it is €15 million per annum. The annual cost is more expensive than the total estimated cost in the first place. It is clear from the reports that analysed the performance of the public service broker that it is not achieving what it set out to achieve. It has some positive aspects to it, but overall it has not achieved the ambitious targets set for it.

One central site in the UK, www.direct.gov.uk allows access to an enormous series of public services which are available on-line. This site highlights the difference in performance between what has been set up in that country and what has been set up here. Applications can be made on-line for student grants and passports, one can text weather forecasts to mobile phones and citizens can report a pothole or faulty street light to a local authority and expect a response within a set timeframe. There is a vast array of health services available on-line. People can join sports clubs through a centralised facility on-line, they can report a crime, join the police, apply for a renewable energy grant, register to vote, apply for planning permission or submit a planning objection. These are the basic things that people want to do in the same way they can book their flight on the Internet. They want to be able to interact with local government and national Government in getting information and paying for services without having to travel into offices to answer questions and fill out forms.

We were supposed to have a national health portal to provide information and application forms on-line. The Minister of State said that a number of projects were abandoned as it was cost effective not to move ahead and spend money on them. However, we spent €2 million on the national health portal and then abandoned it. We also abandoned a portal for driving licence applications, passport applications, haulage licence applications and social welfare projects that looked promising at the beginning. The list goes on.

By international standards, our performance has been very poor. The OECD yesterday joined a long list of international bodies which have criticised our performance. It pointed out that less than half of the flagship projects contained in the e-Government strategy have been implemented in full and that Ireland ranks 17th out of the EU 27 for availability of basic Government services on-line. The European Commission recently labelled our performance as stagnated and consistently places us towards the bottom of its league tables. Most recently, it placed us 11th out of the EU 15 for the availability of basic services on-line.

This is poor performance despite the fact that the percentage of Ireland's GDP that is spent on public sector IT projects is high by international standards. Research by Kablenet found that out of 13 leading EU countries, only Sweden, Denmark, the UK and France spend a higher percentage of GDP on public sector IT projects than Ireland. So in relative terms, we are spending a lot but are not getting the results. It is a familiar story in respect of the big ideas that come from Government, be they decentralisation, the national development plan, the national spatial strategy, the roll-out of our telecommunications infrastructure or the roll-out of e-Government services. There is a big spend when there is plenty of money but the results are not too impressive. Even The Economist intelligence unit ranks Ireland 21st out of 69 in terms of e-readiness. This is a much broader survey that does not just measure e-governance. Yet the Minister of State continues to insist that Ireland rates well compared to our competitors in the EU and globally.

I was interested in the Government's description today of the information society in Ireland as "a process of evolution". This suggests that it needs to be allowed to develop over time and that we need to be patient, that it is almost like a young clumsy animal that is maturing and developing co-ordination by itself. We are the people who need to give leadership and force the pace on this issue. We obviously cannot see into the future in terms of what advances in technology and electronic communications will make possible in the future. However, we know enough to know what kind of information society we need to create in Ireland to keep us competitive and maximise the benefit and dividend that we as a country can get from using technology to its maximum.

Fine Gael sees our telecommunications infrastructure as being as important as road or rail infrastructure in the future. It is no coincidence that this is the second Private Members' motion dealing with this area in less than four months. While Ireland stutters to make progress on creating an information society, other countries are moving ahead with innovative ways of providing government services through technology. In countries like Singapore and Dubai, the early existence of a secure electronic payments system and digital identity system has enabled citizens to conduct almost all of their dealings with government on-line.

In Scandinavia, governments are considering using on-line banking passwords as a way of authenticating users of public services. In the US, a collaboration between government and private sectors has created a website called moving.com which allows users to conduct all transactions associated with moving house, from buying boxes to changing their account with the electricity company, via one website. The local government administration in the District of Columbia in the US uses Google software and tools to save information, thus eliminating the need for expensive consultants to try to put something in place. In India, a pilot project for half a million people uses mobile phones as a means of checking identities in paying pensions and unemployment benefits. This is what is happening outside Ireland. Yet there is a feeling of stagnation in Ireland and we simply are not prioritising this issue as we did ten years ago.

Ireland has fallen behind its competitors within the EU and globally. This is simply not acceptable if we aspire to be the country about which we constantly talk, namely, a competitive destination for companies to come and do business in and in which research and development and innovation can take place so that we can ensure that young people who are ambitious and educated can get the kind of jobs and wage packages they want in the future.

If the economy is to address competitiveness problems around cost and capacity issues relating to telecommunications, we must prioritise these issues. This motion deals primarily with three different categories of priorities. The first relates to our broadband infrastructure and next generation access. I will not go into that in any detail because I am like a broken record in this House trying to get the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources to take next generation broadband access seriously. The second priority, which is the main focus of this motion, is trying to maximise the availability of services on-line to the public and to ensure that Departments can interact with each other on-line, particularly now that decentralisation is moving civil servants further and further apart, so we can harness technology to reduce costs and increase access to services. The third priority in this motion, which is very important considering what has happened recently in the private and public sectors, is to ensure that we have secure protection and treatment of sensitive data for the public when it hands it over.

This motion is an honest assessment of our failures and successes in the past and calls on the Government to give leadership and re-prioritise this issue to move it ahead. We want to work with the Minister of State on this issue. I am not interested in having a political scolding session here on the wastage of the past ten years in terms of e-Government. I am interested in the next ten years. This is why the vast bulk of my motion looks to the future, what needs to be done and international best practice so that we can factor that into our new strategy, which is to be launched this summer. I encourage the Minister of State to work with us so that we can vote together tomorrow night on an ambitious motion that sets down clear targets so that the Minister of State can convince us that he is taking our concerns and priorities seriously in terms of the direction Ireland needs to go.

See this speech in context