Arthur Morgan (Louth, Sinn Fein)

The front-line casualties in the economic crisis we are debating today are the thousands of workers who are losing their jobs every month, and hundreds of viable small to medium sized businesses which are going under because of the credit crunch.

In the past four weeks Dell has announced 1,900 job losses with a further related 4,000 jobs to go; Kostal has let 300 people go; 400 workers have been made redundant in Dundalk and last Monday it was announced that 750 workers in Ulster Bank will join the growing queues at our social welfare offices. While this is happening the Government is doing nothing. Everyone, including the dogs on street, can see that the Government has not done a single thing for Irish workers since this crisis started six months ago. The Government has also ignored small and medium sized businesses. The only noticeable measure the Government has taken has been to bail out its greedy property developing friends through the banking sector. I cannot think of one other move apart from that.

Thanks to this inertia, almost 300,000 people are on jobseeker's benefit and the Minister for Social Welfare, Deputy Mary Hanafin, admits that staff in welfare offices are "working flat out" to process welfare applications. While our dreadful economic circumstances are as clear as daylight, the Government's plan of action is as clear as mud. Over the past four months we have seen one woolly document after another proposing, and leading to, nothing. The Government has done a U-turn on almost every decision it has made and the poor Minister for Finance, Deputy Brian Lenihan and the so-called "excellent people" at the Department of Finance have got nearly every estimate they have made completely wrong.

We had been led to believe that the stimulus package produced last December would provide us with a clear path out of this mess. Instead we got a flimsy discussion document long on waffle and short on ideas. Despite the criticisms from all quarters, the latest framework document headings which were presented by the Department of Finance in the negotiations with the social partners have been described as "vague". According to reports this document did not even mention public sector pay cuts although the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform stated last Monday that nothing could be ruled out.

The confusion that the Taoiseach and the Minister for Finance have created through their mixed signals and dithering has reinforced the public perception that the Government does not know what it is doing. If it does know it is deliberately creating confusion so that it can implement the most severe cutbacks imaginable while the confusion still reigns. Amidst all this uncertainty we are now one of the last countries in the western world to implement a recovery plan.

There has been much talk over the last few weeks of "zombie banks" but the leadership comes from a zombie Government that has helped create our zombie banks. The Minister for Finance unbelievably claimed last week on BBC's "Newsnight" programme that our economy is vibrant. If the Minister bothered to listen to the 5,000 Irish workers who are losing their jobs every week, he would hear a different story. It is this type of nonsense from the Government and senior officials in the banking sector that makes it far more difficult to get to grips with our dire circumstances.

The banking crisis is central to the Government's failures to do anything right at the moment. Despite the Government's claims, this banking crisis was very much of its own making. In the last four months, we have seen the disaster go from bad to worse and we still have no evidence that the Government has finally got on top of it. At this stage, I dread to switch on the news on Sunday nights in case I hear the Government's latest bird-brained idea, probably cooked up by its friends in the banking and property sectors.

The Government's guarantee scheme was described by the Minister for Finance last September as "the cheapest bailout in the world". The taxpayer is now set to take on a €73 billion loan book on top of the Government's €440 billion guarantee scheme and its €10 billion botched recapitalisation. The aim of the latest nationalisation scheme was to get a corrupt, debt-riddled bank and its cash-strapped builders off the hook. At the press conference about the Government's botched recapitalisation scheme, the Minister stated that "nationalisation would be affirming that we have no confidence in the bank as a bank to survive". He then went on to state that under State ownership, it will be "business as usual" for Anglo Irish Bank. The last thing we need is "business as usual" at Anglo Irish Bank. The latest news on the Anglo Irish Bank saga is that the bank will be transformed into some kind of skip for bad debts, which would enable other banks to get off scot free. Why should the taxpayer have to pay for the mess that the banking institutions created themselves, with the help of the Government?

While Irish workers are being asked to bail out the banks, the likes of Seán FitzPatrick and Roddy Molloy are riding off into the sunset with golden handshakes worth hundreds of thousands of euro and pensions worth more than €100,000 per annum. Does the Minister find that acceptable? These people are walking away without being sacked. They resign in advance and walk off with these golden handshakes and huge pensions, at a time when many workers across the private sector are threatened with losing their pensions. The workers at Waterford Wedgwood face the prospect of seeing their pension schemes wiped out, yet these characters are walking off with their huge pensions while the Government does absolutely nothing about it. The public cannot understand that. As a Member of the House, I cannot understand how that is happening and how the Government is presiding over such a catastrophe. I really believe it warrants an explanation.

When will we finally see legislation to outlaw the behaviour of the likes of Seán FitzPatrick? When will there be wholesale changes in our regulators to ensure that it does not keep on happening? While the Government gives golden handshakes to the likes of Roddy Molloy and others, it has shifted responsibility onto public service workers for the mess that it has created. Having listened to senior Government members, IBEC officials and even Fine Gael, one would swear the deficit in public finances is solely down to our public service. Over the past number of months, the attacks on the public sector from these parties have intensified and the public sector has been wrongly described as "inefficient" and "bloated", while public spending is characterised as "unsustainable". There are some inefficiencies in the public sector, but these can be dealt with and managed quickly.

As an economist stated in yesterday's edition of The Irish Times, the crisis in public finance was not created by the public sector, but rather by the property market. Successive Fianna Fáil led Governments, because of their cosy relationship with developers, made this country dependent on property taxes and encouraged a property bubble that continued to swell out of all proportions. With the bursting of the property bubble, which is what bubbles usually do, our revenue plummeted. The Taoiseach encouraged this bubble and it is he and the Minister for Finance who continue to prioritise those dodgy developers over our workers, our SMEs and our economy.

Why should the low paid workers in any sector take the hit for that level of incompetence and the incompetence of those around the Government? If there are savings to be made, why do we not start with the Government's friends who can afford it most? Everyone can see that the CEOs of State bodies from FÁS to Coillte are grossly overpaid, and if anyone must take the hit we must start with these people.

We all accept that there are efficiencies which can be delivered by the public sector but this does not mean taking an axe to it. With all the talk of efficiency and adopting a business model, nobody from IBEC to the Fianna Fáil Party has ever once looked at the horrendous waste of State resources as a result of outsourcing to private companies. We have all seen the bills for so-called consultants. I accept that is improving, but it is very late. In the health system, hundreds of millions of euro have been thrown away on subsidising for-profit health care companies which is only draining our public hospitals of resources. Despite all the claims of efficiency by the Minister for Health and Children, the reality is that private health care is inefficient. It is a complete waste of taxpayers' money and an inferior service to the public system. Numerous reports in the United States have proven that for-profit health care companies, of which the Minister and the Taoiseach are so fond, do not provide the same level of care as public hospitals.

Hundreds of millions of euro in tax is foregone by the State in exemptions for investors through the promotion of private hospitals. This is most evident in the co-location strategy that the Government has continued to pursue, despite the objections of those working in our health system. Why can the Government slap an income levy on people barely over the minimum wage and continue to shelter investors from being taxed on their rental income through private hospital adventures? These are not ordinary people, but extremely wealthy individuals who continue to avoid paying taxes despite our plummeting public finances.

How can the Government find the billions to bail out banks and property developers, when there is not a brass farthing for our schools or the elderly? There is not enough funding to hire midwives to allow them do their work properly. The midwife ratio should be one to every 25 births, but in the maternity unit of Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda, the ratio is currently one midwife to every 48 births. That means that the midwives are doing double the work they should be doing, and double the amount of work that is deemed safe, yet this has prevailed for several years. However, people still tell us that the public service is inefficient. It is surely these areas that need to be examined, rather than undermining our front line services and our low-paid workers.

Sinn Féin made a number of proposals in our pre-budget submission to find the resources to deal with the deficit. The Government did not do enough on a standard rate of tax relief, it failed to lift the PRSI ceiling sufficiently and again did nothing to address the litany of tax exemptions that allow investors to evade paying tax. These are the measures that had to be taken; not some sordid and mean-spirited attack on low-paid workers. Had these measures been acted upon we would be well on the way to meeting the €2 billion target set by the Government.

If the Government wants to get spending under control, it will have to change its "private good, public bad" mindset and put an end to this wasteful outsourcing of our public services. For example, this will mean an end to subsidising the private practice of consultants in public hospitals. The State will have to take control of some useful resources, such as the Corrib gas pipeline. I suggest that it should renationalise our telecommunications network. A major public State bank needs to be established to address these problems. This would involve the nationalisation of a major banking institution to offer credit to small and medium sized enterprises, restructure mortgages to stop families from losing their homes and restore confidence among the Irish people, workers and businesses who have the skills and knowledge to get us out of the current economic turmoil. If we are to encourage economic renewal and secure our public finances, the public will have to come first and property developers will have to follow behind, for a change.

In the statement he made in the House earlier this afternoon, the Taoiseach argued that as the situation deteriorated, the Government introduced an early budget to make some difficult expenditure and taxation adjustments and give clear signal of its determination to respond to the various economic pressures the country was under. Perhaps some of the more interesting aspects of the Taoiseach's statement need to be examined in closer detail. It is worth remembering that the Government was on holidays for most of the early part of this crisis last summer. It did not bother to come back. The Spanish Government came back to try to do something about the crisis, at least. In the absence of a prepared plan, the Government's reaction to the pressure of the public, which had started to appreciate the gravity of the situation, was to introduce a rushed budget in October rather than December. Some people thought it was a good sign that the Government was about to take action, but that was not the case. It decided to take medical cards from older people. Its decision to slash the education budget affected teachers and students. It imposed a 1% income levy on people on the minimum wage. Those three disastrous decisions were reversed, thankfully, following public protests. That was welcome, even if the Government had been forced to back down.

If the Government had accepted the pre-budget submissions of organisations like the Conference of Religious in Ireland and my party, Sinn Féin, we would have made significantly more progress by now. The Taoiseach told us earlier today that the Government had clearly set out the measures it intended to take to support a return to sustainable growth and encourage job creation over the medium term. His contribution set out some vague aspirations, rather than any detailed or specific actions. I would have welcomed some detail. If we had got it, perhaps we could have supported it. We did not get that information, however, which is unfortunate.

In the comments I have made so far, I have dealt primarily with Fianna Fáil's contribution to this crisis. The presence of the Minister of State, Deputy Sargent, reminds me to speak about the role of the Green Party in government. To be frank, I have not heard any solutions from the Green Party. It has not made any proposals on how to make our way out of the economic mess that has been created by 11 years of virtually the same Government. We may have got a hint of what the Green Party is doing when the leader of that party spoke in Drogheda, which is in my constituency, last Saturday. His contribution to solving the economic crisis was to say that he intended to examine the expenses and allowances of Deputies. The Ceann Comhairle will be more aware than most that Members on every side of this House have been in favour of the reform of the expenses and allowances processes for some time. I do not know why the leader of the Green Party was wagging his finger in Drogheda last Saturday, especially as the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission had announced significant changes to the system of Deputies' expenses and allowances on the previous Tuesday. He was well out of touch. If that is the best advice he can give as we try to get out of the economic crisis we face, that sums up the impact of the Green Party in government. It is extremely disappointing and unfortunate.

I hope somebody in the Green Party can remind that party's leadership that policy positions need to be drawn up to deal with this ongoing crisis. Perhaps some of the proposals that have been made by Members on this side of the House can be examined to see it they merit consideration. The Green Party needs to develop some policies if it is to deal with this problem. To completely ignore the biggest economic crisis the State has faced since its foundation is less than worthy of any political party. I will conclude on a constructive note by assuring the Government that if it produces a decent plan, we will support as many elements of it as we can. No plan has been introduced to date. It is about time for a proper plan to be developed and proper structures to be put in place to deal with the economic crisis. We have seen no such plan to date.

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