Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)

It gives me no pleasure to speak on this budget, which was a failed budget as soon as the Minister sat down after his 45 minute speech. It did not deal with the macroeconomic realities. It is now a dead budget because, so far, two key expenditure items have been seriously altered, the income levy and the medical card fiasco.

The Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrats ideological surge to the right has prevented them from abandoning the 5% nonsense associated with the medical cards. They have bought in partly to the erosion of the principle of universality and its replacement with means testing. This is back to the poorhouse mentality, which I never expected to see from Fianna Fáil, but it is here now and embedded in its core.

I have some experience of budgets and was around the Cabinet table for the formulation of nine of them, participating as Minister for Finance in three. This is a bad budget because it does not do the primary task with which it was charged. It does not work. Worse, the Minister's speech was a very poor budget speech, because it had no strategy, coherence, clear message or sense of direction. The call for patriotic action at the end of it was the most cynical act I have heard in a long time in the House.

Seán O'Rourke asked me to speak on "News at One" on the day of the budget. What I said is in the public domain. I said I was fearful. I said that the Minister, Deputy Brian Lenihan, was a very able and clever man as his academic track record will prove. However, he is the youngest Minister in terms of experience around the Cabinet table. He has no family or personal economic or commercial experience. Sadly, because I like the man personally, when I sat down to hear the Budget Statement that reluctant analysis was borne out. The budget content was worse than expected. I have some experience in this area. The budget speech was both structured and written by civil servants. It clearly was never politically proofread. Hence the 1% levy was announced as being on all income and not what the Government has now conceded. The announcement about the medical cards for the over-70s was simply nonsense and we now have the unravelling day by day of the contents of that scheme. We have yet to see the full impact of the series of depth charges that have been dropped into the ocean that is the primary, secondary and tertiary education sector.

I say to you, a Chathaoirligh, as a professional accountant with some expertise in this area, that the Fianna Fáil reputation for sound macroeconomic management is clearly a myth that needs to be debunked. Let me start as far back as 1977 with the Fianna Fáil election manifesto of Jack Lynch, George Colley, Des O'Malley and Martin O'Donoghue. I can recall in this House when the then Minister for Finance announced in his budget speech that total expenditure amounted to borrowing of 13% of GNP, there was a round of applause from the economically illiterate clowns on the Fianna Fáil benches on the far side. Within two years we were in crisis to the extent that Charles Haughey mounted a coup and took over. However, Mr. Haughey was even worse than Mr. Lynch, who was economically illiterate. Mr. Colley's problem was that he was too honest and he actually implemented the promises contained in the manifesto for the election Fianna Fáil never expected to win.

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