Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

I move amendment No. 2:

To delete all words after "Dáil Éireann" and substitute the following:

"—accepts the need to reduce borrowing in 2009 by €2 billion, as outlined in the Revised Stability Programme;

calls for a detailed review and amendment of the measures announced by Government on 3 February 2009 to secure a fairer balance;

calls for major reform and restructuring of programmes and agencies to get maximum value for the taxpayer;

calls for the presentation of a credible five year economic plan; and

calls for a fresh package of initiatives to address the issues of job loss, competitiveness, credit and new economic opportunities."

No one can doubt the truth of the Minister's statement that it is crucial to get our public finances right. Equally we have seen today a serious wake-up call to anyone who is concerned about the future of the economy in that a total of 35,500 extra people have been added to the live register in one month, representing 2% of the private employment workforce. I ask the House to consider if this were to be the situation for another six months, 12 months or 18 months because it is a vista too appalling to consider.

This is the reason the Fine Gael amendment to the motion includes a request for a coherent economic plan for the next five years. I cannot accept the reheated stew of measures that have peppered every document for the past ten years and which the Minister produced before Christmas as the smart economy. This is not squaring up to the crisis we now face, a crisis in which jobs are melting away. I agree we have to look at the opportunities and we must make investments now which will allow opportunities materialise but we also have to look very critically at what is happening in the here and now, at the competitiveness we have lost and its impact on the leaching of jobs.

Last night, I described the Government's programme as announced yesterday as a stool with just one leg and this is the problem. The one leg is the Government's action on public service pay, predominantly, with a few things tacked on. However, this is not a strategy that will get us out of this situation and I will return to that point. The truth is we now need a serious strategy to look at the loss of jobs. Last night, the Minister talked about electricity price reductions being reviewed some time in the future. We need those reductions to have happened last week and last month. The notion of regulators sitting around and having reviews and waiting is not acceptable. The price that public bodies charge to people competing abroad is a crucial ingredient. We have to pull those prices down at every possible opportunity. We must freeze them and pull them down where we can and this should be a concerted task of Government.

We need to see targeted credit measures. I do not for a moment underestimate the gravity of what the Minister is trying to deal with in the banks. However, there is no sign of the targeted credit measures that would get small business going and this is what we are all hearing. I do not underestimate the problems but we have to target credit. Other countries are looking at targeted vehicles to do this, but we are not. I refer to the significance of reskilling but I must ask the Minister if he believes that putting 95% of the funding for this project through FÁS is the best way to get a reskilling programme attuned to modern needs. I have grave doubts about this, as do many people.

Anti-competitive practices exist in parts of the public sector which the Government has tolerated for years, for example, in the electricity and transport systems. These cannot be tolerated any longer while there is a haemorrhage of jobs in the private sector.

In the past, Enterprise Ireland would have considered putting preference shares into companies with viable, long-term plans but which were experiencing temporary difficulties. Is this still a vehicle that Government regards as a means of dealing with export companies going through temporary difficulties? Perhaps the Government should take genuine shareholding in such companies. We have to start thinking about how we protect the crucial element that will keep our economy strong in the long term, that is, jobs in the trading sectors of the economy. All the talk is about some cutbacks in the sheltered sector, which I agree are needed, but we also need to pay attention to the trading sector and deal with it.

The country needs confidence now and we need a Government that is plotting a clear course, a Government that is credible and has a road map of actions. There is no other government other than our own that thinks the right action is to announce cuts in the public sector pay bill and which outsources this action to some group chaired by Colm McCarthy, who is no doubt a worthy man, and which will make decisions about delivering efficiency in our system and a Government which outsources action on taxation to some other group. The Government's job is to govern and the Dáil is here to consider options, and I suggest we have a debate about options, such as how efficiencies can be achieved.

The Minister knows as well as me that he has persisted with an appalling budgeting system that denies this House any opportunity to scrutinise what is being done. He will not even produce the targets proposed for public spending until three or four months after the Dáil has voted the money. He will not hold anyone accountable for their failure to deliver on those targets when we eventually see them. The budget is blanket voted on budget day which is a complete farce. There is no scrutiny of public spending. That is the reason it has produced these appalling decisions. I will not go into the issue of the electronic voting machines and all the other appalling problems but there is no serious scrutiny in this House.

We are not doing our job because Government is now allowing us do it. That is a deep fault line in the way we make decisions about money and it has created the crazy carry-on we see all around us where people who are grossly incompetent in the public service get huge golden hand shakes and walk away. People are furious that is still going on and they do not see in anything the Minister did yesterday an indication that there is an end in sight to that culture of the cosy group, where Ministers are protected from having to admit that they failed and where senior public servants can deliver only 40% of what they said they would deliver six months ago and get a bonus. They failed to deliver 60% of what they were responsible for and yet they get a bonus under the Minister's system. The Minister protects that pool of money to give these people bonuses when they are already on a salary of €300,000 or whatever, which are not linked in any way to serious performance targets. The Minister and I know that is the system and it must change. That is the reason people are so frustrated.

There will be a backlash against these partial proposals because people do not see the other side of the agenda. They are not eager about paying but they will live with taking pain if they thought it was balanced, that the political system was changing, the highly paid public servants were made earn their money and, if they failed, that there are consequences, and that senior people in the banks, who we now support to a huge extent, equally take the consequences of their bad decisions. If we started to see that in place, people would have find it much more credible that there is a broad based strategy in place but the Minister has only one leg of that stool. There is no reform agenda either in terms of making us more competitive to protect employment or making the system more transparent with regard to the way it spends money and guards every halfpenny of public money in order to get value from it. That is not what is happening in this system. We must get back to that.

There was a lucid moment in the Taoiseach's speech last week when he asked how clearly is the problem understood and how clear is the strategy designed to address it. In responding to the first question he said we should forget about looking back at the past. We must get real. The Minister's Government has not been implementing good policies that have been ruined by some calamity from abroad. There were deep flaws in the policies that have been pursued. There have been deep flaws in the fiscal policy, in the attitude to property, through the regulatory and Government system, and in public service management and getting results for public money.

The system we have been operating is not fit for purpose and unless Government, from the Taoiseach and the Ministers down, admit that and that it must now change, we will not get change. We might get through a few years and get back to the practice but we will be failing the people who elected us to this House. This is a crisis and there must be real change that is much more far-reaching than anything the Minister has suggested. It disappoints me that a clear strategy is not being outlined that is balanced and that addresses the problems we face.

The Government invested all its political capital in the discussions with the social partners. I can understand that. It would be welcome to have the social partners backing this measure but what the Minister has failed to do is convince the members of the public that he has a credible strategy. They do not see it. I do not see it, and I am closer than most to the issue. The combination of a few pages issued by the Department of Finance on the stability programme, a document full of hope but with no time lines produced before Christmas, and what the Minister produced yesterday does not amount to a strategy to get us out of this hole. That is what is sorely missing and is what must be put in place. That is the reason Fine Gael has called for a credible five year economic plan.

I accept the Minister has to reduce borrowing by €2 billion in this year but that is not delivered in this measure. The Minister's figures mention €2.09 billion. He has admitted that €277 million of that will not be realised in 2009. That brings the figure back to €1.7 billion. On top of that there is tax buoyancy——

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