Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

I support Deputy Bruton's amendment. Fianna Fáil is addicted to tax incentives for property development and construction because it feels their introduction was the goose that laid the golden egg, creating the boom years of the Celtic tiger. It should be obvious to the Minister that they destroyed the Celtic tiger. The Minister's predecessor was advised of that on many occasions and largely came around to agree with that viewpoint. Politically, however, he found himself unable or unwilling to do anything about it. Part of the public reaction to Fianna Fáil's misgovernment is due to that party's decision both to enjoy the boom, its political benefits and the votes it brought and to extend and blow up the bubble even higher through the use of a widening circle of tax breaks that ultimately caused the property boom to collapse in on itself.

As Mr. Dunlop, who is a former Fianna Fáil Government press secretary, was taken off to jail yesterday, I was struck by his encouragement of incredible levels of rezoning in County Dublin in particular, which in turn fed into an era of intense property and construction speculation. While that era was fed by the kind of corruption revealed at the planning tribunal and for which Mr. Dunlop was jailed yesterday, it also was fed by the intense development of tax breaks for property speculation and construction. Unfortunately, the subsequent collapse, which is costing hundreds of thousands of people their jobs, livelihoods and businesses, has been brought about by a fatal concoction of corruption within the planning process that was peculiarly associated with elements within Fianna Fáil and significant elements within the Fine Gael Party, albeit not all of them, on the old Dublin County Council, as well as with the incredible binge on tax exemption, tax avoidance and so on, absolutely all of which was legitimate.

The proposals contained in amendments Nos. 12 and 13 are modest, namely, to have a serious cost-benefit analysis on the lines acknowledged by the Minister's predecessor, the Taoiseach, Deputy Cowen, in 2005 and 2006, when he commissioned both an independent report and a report by his Department into the various schemes. In addition, from a political perspective, the now defunct Progressive Democrats negotiated as its price in government the continuance and expansion of the private co-location hospital scheme of development, which again was funded almost entirely through cheap credit and tax breaks from the taxpayer. The cheap credit has dried up and is no longer available and, consequently, in so far as such schemes remain extant, they depend on the generosity of the taxpayer through the tax break.

On economic grounds, the Minister ought to consider this amendment, which is a modest request to have a detailed cost-benefit analysis of such a tax break . Few Members share the vision of our hospital services that is implied by the co-location scheme. The Health Service Executive appears to be about to do away with almost all the smaller public hospitals-----

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