Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

I wish to share time with Deputies D'Arcy, Terence Flanagan and Bannon.

I congratulate Deputy Coveney on tabling this timely and appropriate motion. It is particularly fortuitous in the context of the e-Government report which is due. Having read the Minister of State, Deputy Tom Kitt's, contribution, I do not see any evidence of a new approach emerging. We have been told there will be a new strategy in July 2008. We will give one cheer for a new strategy but I see this statement from Deputy Kitt as saying everything is going swimmingly. He is praising all the progress that has been made but almost passing over in silence the serious problems that have arisen with the e-Government strategy which has only achieved half of what it set out to achieve. We have slipped from being first in 2001 to 17th in the EU now. The graph in the OECD report shows we were flying upwards until 2003, we peaked at 55% accessibility on-line and then the graph falls away. Throughout the tenure of the Minster, Deputy Cowen, and the Minister of State, Deputy Tom Kitt, in the Department of Finance, supposedly driving this as the core strategy, it flatlined for the whole subsequent four years. There is an issue of responsibility and a need to acknowledge that things are not working well. Until we square up to this, I will only give one cheer for the existence of a new strategy. The crucial question is whether the new strategy has learned from what went wrong in the last one. What changes will we see in the new strategy that will reflect the lessons learned? I do not think I am doing the Minister of State an injustice when I say one would search in vain for any indication of where these radical changes in the strategy will be and we are told it will be published in two months.

We have had the benefit of the OECD report and of the report of the Comptroller and Auditor General. The Minister of State's officials and other officials have sat down for months with these people and know their thinking yet I do not see the changes being made. A casual reading of the OECD report will show it refers to 30 out of 70 flagship projects delivered. Someone was responsible for the 40 that were not delivered. What went wrong and what do we learn from what went wrong?

The report states there was no financial pressure created through either the Estimates or funding process to ensure these projects were delivered. Will we see change? There was no articulation in the Minister of State's speech of the financial pressure that would deliver change. The information society group is described as having adopted a cheerleader's role in respect of the roll-out of e-Government. We have not seen from the Minister of State a change from being a cheerleader to engaging, delivering and driving change. The opportunity for information-sharing in health services which can greatly improve resource use and patient care is not being taken up in Ireland. We do not see an indication of some new thinking and some new drive.

The Opposition will be accused of being unduly critical but the e-Government strategy was not some incidental marginal strategy and a sideshow; this was supposed to be a core element of our drive for the knowledge information society. We were told this was to be Ireland's area of competitive advantage for the future and we needed to position ourselves in the leading edge, yet this is the area in which we dropped from first to 17th place. It was not just on the watch of the Minister of State, Deputy Tom Kitt, admirable though his qualities are. A Cabinet committee with the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste and Minister for Finance, the core of Government, was supposed to be driving this project. A committee of Secretaries General was also supposed to be driving this project. All the stops were pulled out, it would seem, and yet we did not deliver. There needs to be some fundamental questioning of why did this not happen. Why did the Government apparently set its ambitions, put in its best people, have people from the Taoiseach down riding shotgun and yet not deliver? We need to see some answers in terms of how the strategy must change for the future if we are not to go merrily off at the end of this debate and announce new targets and new people responsible. If there is a lack of co-operation between groups and an unwillingness to seize the advantages of shared services because different agencies protect their turf, according to the OECD report, and if this is the problem, what changes will we see?

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