Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)

I wish to share time with Deputies McManus and Morgan.

The response of the Government to the critical downturn in the economy is too little, too late. It promises unspecified pain and delivers no hope. The Government claims we are better off now than in the early 1980s, which is true, but it behaves as if it had no room for manoeuvre. The corrections in current expenditure should have been prepared earlier. The Government parties did not need to wait for the mid-year Exchequer returns to establish how bad is the position. The then Minister for Finance, Deputy Cowen, knew when he announced his final budget how bad things were and he failed to make the necessary, prudent provisions. No contingency planning or preparation was undertaken by the Department of Finance and we have been sadly lacking the leadership needed since this year's budget was delivered.

The Minister for Finance and the Taoiseach do not have the courage or the ability to deliver the political and economic leadership needed. They have two complementary tasks to preform. First, current expenditure must be reduced to address the massive fall in tax income and, second, productive investment must be boosted in areas of need. With regard to current expenditure, in addition to what is proposed, the Government should go further and repudiate, not postpone, the recommended pay increases of the high level review group for Ministers and senior public servants. The same repudiation, not postponement, should also apply to the recently recommended increases in the salaries of chief executive officers of commercial semi-State bodies.

If the Government is to secure the co-operation of the social partners, to which the Minister of State, Deputy Kelleher, referred, it must lead by example. For the first time ever, a 24-month pay freeze must be introduced in the public sector for all grades above assistant principal, with a flat rate cash increase for all grades below that, which would have a progressive impact on the many lower paid public servants. Decentralisation should be postponed indefinitely and I welcome the Minister of State at the Department of Finance, Deputy Mansergh, who is partly responsible for that programme. In light of what we know is facing us as a nation, the programme is not sustainable. The cost of its carbon footprint and the effect on efficiency in terms of institutional memory and meetings was not foreseen when the proposal was first made, mad and all as it was at the time.

With regard to investment, the Government should move effectively and quickly to commit to capital projects that are ready to proceed and that are desperately needed. I will confine my remarks to the school building programme. A total of 40,000 primary school children are housed in prefabricated buildings. A number of schools building projects are ready to proceed, which could be undertaken immediately and which would pick up the slack in the building industry as a result of a reduction in house completions from 88,000 in 2006 to a projected 35,000 this year.

I refer to Our Lady's primary school, Templeogue, in a neighbouring constituency of mine. The builder was due to go on site on 23 June, but the school was instructed not to proceed on 22 June. The project involves a €4 million extension and the school, its pupils, parents and teachers have waited nine years for it to commence. Money is available within the borrowing capacity of our economy and the resources of the NTMA and it was an obscenity to learn that €500 million of taxpayers' money is invested on our behalf in Zimbabwe by the National Pensions Reserve Fund, which could be invested in our children's future education. If this is the type of leadership we can expect from this Administration at a time of crisis, then God save Ireland.

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