Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

I thank the Leas-Cheann Comhairle.

I will take up a theme of the Minister of State, Deputy Roche, who said we are deluding ourselves. Listening to the Taoiseach yesterday was deeply dispiriting. He scoffed at every proposal that came from these benches, saying they were inadequate. He offered the Oireachtas no role in defining the nature of the framework or the challenges we must meet nor in how we must address them. He gave no hint that he or any of his Ministers bore any responsibility whatsoever for any of the problems we address.

The reality out there is seething anger about the way in which we have been driven into this deep recession, unprepared by Government and by those who were supposed to look out as regulators. They look in at politics and see the sham nature of debate in which the Government is not willing to open up any realistic analysis of what is going on. People are alarmed at what is going on in this country. They see gross incompetence and no consequences. They see golden handshakes for people who displayed incompetence or even worse. They see auditors marked absent when serious issues were happening. They see practices condoned that are outrageous: the extravagant set-up of this Dáil, with all its committees and those who are paid retainers to occupy places on them; the unjustified bonuses paid to public servants when the areas for which they have responsibility are manifestly failing; and the repeated refusal by anyone to accept responsibility for catastrophic failures that have occurred in this economy. That is what people look at and why they lose confidence that we have a Government that is willing or capable to make the changes for which this crisis calls.

The Taoiseach opened his address with one lucid paragraph:

In assessing how well we are prepared to confront the crisis it is reasonable to consider how well the nature of the problem is understood, how clear is the strategy that is designed to respond to it and how credible are the measures to be taken and how likely they are to succeed.

Having set out that lucid set of three items to be looked at, the Taoiseach totally ignored them in the rest of his contribution. How well is the nature of these problems understood by the Taoiseach? It was alarming that there was not a single mention of any public policy failure in the course of his address. A budget system that comes from the Dark Ages has seen money spent in appallingly inefficient ways. The undermining of a performance-oriented public service was done knowingly and deliberately by Government in its decisions on benchmarking and decentralisation and in the establishment of the HSE without any restructuring. These damaged the concept that high performance was important in the public sector.

The Government did not bother to analyse properly the challenges before it made catastrophic decisions. These include the fostering of a property bubble that was repeatedly supported by the Taoiseach as based on sound economic fundamentals; the gross failure of regulation right through this period to constrain irresponsible lending practices; and the destruction of competitiveness by the Government.

The source of our uncompetitiveness is due to factors for which the Government is responsible. Our over-priced electricity and waste systems and our inefficient telecom system are all areas the Government either manages or regulates. It has failed. There was the irresponsible fiscal stimulus that was pursued by Fianna Fáil Ministers in every election that occurred. We have the failed public service management system that saw, in the last year for which we have figures, 40% of set targets not delivered. There were no consequences for either Ministers or public servants. We have the failed system of public pay determination which, less than a year ago, had the Taoiseach coming into the House to tell us that he and his colleagues deserved €35,000 extra in public pay. That, for them, was at a time when they were presiding over catastrophic failures in the system.

If we want to get real and face up to these issues we must realise that those elements are at the heart of why we, exceptionally, are most unprepared for this challenge. We must realise why we have seen the greatest decline in jobs, the greatest problems in our public finances and why we see people with houses that will never regain the value of the price paid for them. People are petrified that they will be next to lose their jobs. We are most exposed because of policy failures and these were not once mentioned by the Taoiseach.

If we do not understand what got us into this hole, by God, we will not get out of it. Ministers must get real and face up to their own failures because resolving those failures is part of getting us out of this position. There is no point in the Government pretending that nobody in Government is responsible, that this is some sort of a once-in-a-lifetime calamity that has broken upon our shores from abroad, that there were great, sensible and sustainable polices here that were ruined by some forces from overseas. That is just not real and Ministers must know that. If they do not, they do not deserve to be Ministers. The Government has been living in a cocoon of its own making and that has done untold damage to our people.

People will accept pain and they will accept pay cuts but, by God, they require to see that the members of Government are squaring up to the revolution that must occur in the way business is done in this House, in the regulation of monopolies and in the management of partnership. We must see revolution right through the system and it must start in this House. We must renew politics. This sham debate of the past two days is undermining the last shreds of the confidence of people that the political system is aware of the challenges and is willing to square up to them. The scoffing we have noted from the Taoiseach is contemptible. It does not do his office justice. At this time of crisis he should be looking to get support wherever he can, from this House and from the social partners. People say on that side of the House that I and Fine Gael do not support social partnership. We do support social partnership and we want to see it facing up to the changes that must be made. Let us be very clear. It is not the shaping of an agreement of consensus that will get us out of here. It is the effectiveness of the measures that will get us out of here. Consensus and the procedure of getting consensus are not the vital element, rather it is the decisions and the effective change we bring to this country that will make the difference.

I shall return to the Taoiseach's second point, namely, how clear the strategy is that is designed to respond to this crisis. Nobody in this House, or on this side of it, can see clarity in the nature of this strategy. We got a table from a Department of Finance document called "Addendum to the Irish Stability Programme: Update". That makes two addendums and updates in the one. It contains a mere five figures, namely, €2 billion next year, €4 billion the following year, €4 billion the year following that, €3.5 billion and then €3 billion. That is the sum total of the strategy. That is not a plan or a strategy, it is a wish. They would like to see borrowing dropped by that sum in those years and, lo and behold, with one bound our hero is free. That is not a plan. That is not what can be presented to this House to have a serious debate about the choices we face. It is about time the Government wised up to this fact.

The framework for a plan is full of platitudes. It is thin enough gruel so everyone can agree to it and sit down and talk, but let us not delude ourselves into thinking this is a plan either. The plan for the smart economy, Lord above, is a poorly reheated stew of promises that have peppered almost every document I have seen in the past ten years from the Government. There are no timelines, no budgets and no responsibility is assigned. That is not a plan to create a smart economy so do not let us delude ourselves.

We are long past the time for the ritual dances that are going on here. We cannot pass off hopes as strategy. We must get down to serious revolution — I say this advisedly — in the way we do our business. Budget 2009 should be scrapped. There should be no attempt at running repairs or finding and tacking on €2 billion of savings. It needs to go right to the heart of budgeting. We need budgets that are not about the demands of agencies on Government but the needs of people. That would turn the budget 180°. The agencies that would get money would be those which are saying "I can do this next year" or "I will commit to deliver this to people next year". Only then would they get the money. We would tie performance rigidly to what they committed to, and that would be a revolution. We should withdraw the budget and begin that process.

Let us honestly square up to the changes we can make this year, next year and the following year by addressing this issue programme by programme. Let the Dáil for once be a real Chamber where we can have proper discussions about choices, where the views of committees are taken seriously. The PAC has long since told us we need to reform our Estimates procedure. Every party is on that committee — Fianna Fáil, Labour and Fine Gael — but it is contemptuously ignored by the Government. Let us begin to change the way we do business here and there is some chance we can offer leadership to the people, who are craving it at a time when they are petrified with fear given the way the economy is going.

If anything, the views of the Department of Finance are highly optimistic about the scale of the challenge we face. We need to have an honest debate about this and to articulate strategies, not just €2 billion for next year, but how we are going to confront this over a series of years. That debate has not started in this House and the Government stands condemned for failing to act.

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