Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

I suppose we should be grateful that the curtain is finally coming down on a year in which the Government's chaotic management of the public finances has been on display. There has been an unprecedented deterioration in the condition of the public finances over the course of 2008. It is hard to believe that the Government, having been in surplus just two years ago, will have to borrow €12 billion this year. The Government is on course to double the national debt within less than four years. The golden rule that used to guide public borrowing policy — that one should borrow for capital purposes only — has been cast aside. By the end of this year, 30% of the Government's borrowing will relate to day-to-day expenditure. That figure will double to 60% next year. That is no way to run a railway. We cannot raise money from international bankers only to use it for day-to-day spending. At this time, it is vital that we use money to invest in the infrastructure this country badly needs.

The Taoiseach, Deputy Cowen, fell asleep at the wheel when he was Minister for Finance. He failed to recognise that the underlying strength of the Irish economy was deteriorating seriously and became totally obsessed with the property bubble. He pretended that it was based on sound economic fundamentals. The core of our small open economy was exposed and gradually undermined. This country's export market share has collapsed over five successive years. Ireland has become the most exposed country to the ravages of the international recession.

Over the past 12 months, the Government has continued to deny what is happening, in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary. Most of the proposals it has produced, late in the day, are not delivering efficiencies. For example, we were told on budget day that 41 State agencies were to be rationalised on foot of careful work that had been conducted. However, the Minister for Finance cannot point to a single euro that has been saved as a result of rationalisation. What sort of programme of rationalisation was that? The whole point of rationalising one's bureaucracy is to save money to protect one's front line services. What we have seen from the Government has been the opposite of that. Bureaucratic agencies have been protected while meaningless rationalisations have taken place. The axe is falling at the front line.

When Deputy Cowen became Taoiseach, having been in charge of the public finances as Minister for Finance for four years, he suddenly announced that his priority was reform of the public service. He did not introduce any reforms during the four years for which he was responsible for the public service. When he became Taoiseach, he decided that this was his priority. What has happened as a result? We have been given promises of reviews. Following the 2008 budgetary review, the OECD was appointed to undertake another review. A further budgetary review was announced in October. There was then the report of the implementation group on the review by the OECD. At the end of that fifth review an bord snip was appointed to conduct yet another review. We will be six reviews from taking action by the time an bord snip reports to Government.

Ministers need to cotton on to the fact that voters elect them to make decisions on what are the priorities and where the cuts should fall. It is not people like Colm McCarthy and whoever else in his group, estimable as they may be, that we want to make decisions about this. We do not expect them to be aware of where the pressures on Departments are occurring, and what agencies are doing and whether they are coming up to performance standards. We expect Ministers to do that.

The sad reality is that Ministers blithely ignore the commitments they make. I went through the commitments made by Ministers in their so-called output statements only to discover that 40% of the commitments they made in respect of 2007 they did not deliver. If the priorities are not delivered, one would expect that Ministers would come in shame-faced to explain what went wrong. There is no such accountability by Ministers nor do the senior civil servants who are responsible for implementing these programmes come in shame-faced. On the contrary — they award themselves 10% bonuses for performance. How in the name of providence is it possible to come up with a scheme where when almost half of projects that were committed to be delivered by senior executives fail to be delivered, bonuses are handed out to them? It is ludicrous and the Government pretends it is powerless to deal with it. This is a system that is outside its control and done independently.

We need to move on and decide that senior public servants as well as Ministers are accountable for delivery. If there is failure on their watch they need to take responsibility. It would make them far more careful about the projects to which they commit, the cost estimates they give those projects and what they deliver on the ground. Under Fianna Fáil there is a culture in the public service where professional standards do not matter. It started with benchmarking when the Government allowed people to get pay increases without changing and delivering results. Then it went on to decentralisation where it thought it could move public servants around like pawns on a board without any regard to the professional work they were doing and the impact it was having on them. It then established the HSE which was a command and control centralised bureaucracy. The only justification for doing so might have been to rationalise the bureaucracy underneath and find savings to show that it could deliver at the front line. What did the Government do? It decided that people beneath in all those middle management positions would retain their posts and would not need to be moved.

All those policies suggested only one thing to the public service, which was that professional standards do not matter. The Government did not care whether public servants got money without delivering results. It did not care about the importance of their work when it came to the Government's political skins and wanting to move public servants into marginal constituencies. That sort of thinking has undermined our capability to deliver quality public services from what has been an enormous increase in public spending up to this year. We are now facing into a period when there will be no money. However, the high professional standards that should have been put in place for people to work to and the pride in their jobs that people could have had has been seriously damaged by foolhardy policies introduced by Fianna Fáil over a long period.

As we move into these much tougher times, Ministers need to get real. When they set a standard and define a strategy they need to say, "If this strategy fails, my neck is going to be on the line". However, in strategy after strategy no such responsibility is taken. With the climate change strategy, which eight years on has delivered nothing on emissions, no Minister has taken responsibility. At best the health strategy has delivered 20% of the hospital beds and primary care improvements, and yet no Minister takes responsibility. After three years, fewer than half of the targets in the e-Government strategy have been delivered and no one takes responsibility.

Ministers cannot pretend that strategies will happen just by them attending glitzy launches and then disappearing into the undergrowth after which when everything goes wrong there is someone else to be blamed. They need to get down to the job of managing their Departments, holding the public servants under them accountable, having proper professional contracts engaged in and delivering the commitments into which they entered with the public. The sad reality is that commitments made to the public have never been regarded as anything more than a sop to get them through elections.

As we come to draw down the curtain on 2008 and see that the Government has spent €1 billion more and raised €8 billion less than it expected, we see a Department of Finance and a Government in serious turmoil. It is no longer able to control events as far as the public finances are concerned. When the budget was brought forward the one thing people expected was that a real strategy for the future would be articulated. They did not expect this would be an exercise in targeting the most vulnerable group — our grandparents in need of health care and our children looking for a decent schooling to represent the potential for the future — but that is what they got. They got no strategy. There was no sense that there was a team with a Minister and Taoiseach at the helm with a course charted to get us out of this. This was a panic measure introduced at the last minute and did not fulfil people's expectations.

One might ask why people are looking at the Government in bewilderment. It is because the promise the Government made to them has not been delivered. That is the consequence. By building up expectations without delivering the Government rightly must suffer the whirlwind of unpopularity. Unfortunately some of the most vulnerable people will be hurt as the economy hits the buffers.

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