Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

People will not pay much attention to these Estimates in the context of what they fear will happen to them tomorrow. It is interesting to consider the content of some of the Estimates, particularly for health which is one of the bigger ones, a large part of which covers changes because people are retiring early. Is it true that most of those retiring are in the nursing grades and that only 16% are administrators, of whom everyone agrees there are far too many between the Department and the HSE? Herein lies the problem. We all agree, across the House, that front line services provided by nurses, doctors, teachers and gardaí are important to sustaining society and our public services. These Estimates, however, show that these are the types of people who are leaving in large numbers because they feel extremely demoralised and fear what the future will bring if they stay on, and because their employer behaved with an unbelievable degree of incompetence in the recent negotiations.

I am aware that in the run-up to the one-day strike there was a degree of intemperate media coverage which sought to make scapegoats of staff working in public services as though they were the enemy of every small businessman, enterprise and private sector worker in the country. The Fianna Fáil backbenchers listened most to these attacks because many of them are the proprietors of small and medium-sized businesses and would naturally have that point of view, which is extremely hostile to the public service. It is a pretty cheap shot to make public enemy number one not of the bankers and developers who ruined the economy, and those who fostered the climate of greed, but of the doctor, teacher, nurse, garda and the serving soldier, each of whom is being treated as something to be cleansed from our society.

The private sector, like the public sector, has its good and bad points. Nothing is ever as black and white as Fianna Fáil would like to portray it. These Estimates show that the consequence of the budgetary decisions taken last year in the various emergency budgets and measures have resulted in a massive outflow of people from the public services. It was also clear in the negotiations which failed last week that there was another large squad of people in each Department waiting to take up a similar position. The mechanism which the public service unions had arrived at to find a bridging mechanism for 2010 with permanent savings through transformation thereafter would not have been like the fudge on benchmarking two.

In 2000, public sector wages cost approximately €9 billion. By this year they were up to €20 billion, largely because in a construction-driven boom while Charlie McCreevy was receiving lots of taxes he said, "When I have it I spend it". Money was thrown around to anybody with his or her hand out, which drove the housing and property bubble, all of which has collapsed disastrously.

While it may have seemed like a fabulous victory for the Lenihan wing, the neo-conservative view in Fianna Fáil, I suspect it will be a pyrrhic one because it is well worth fighting for the goal of a unified, efficient, reformed public service.

What has been highlighted already is that, for example, in most Garda stations and Garda districts throughout the country, the most important, senior gardaí have retired not just in ordinary numbers or in double the ordinary numbers, but to a degree that has to be extremely worrying for anyone who represents a constituency like mine or like the Minister, Deputy Willie O'Dea's, where organised serious criminality among dedicated, professional groups of criminals and paramilitaries is a fact of life.

What I fear is that the Government, as an employer, will now get the worst of all worlds from what has happened with the breakdown of negotiations. Senior, required staff in front line positions are now heavily incentivised, from a morale point of view alone, to leave and just say: "I have had enough. I am not going to deal with the fallout from this." The consequences of this is to go down the MacSharry road with regard to what happened to our health services in 1987. Leaving party politics out of it, everybody knows that while the MacSharry changes in 1987 achieved some good outcomes, they were a total disaster for the health services. In fact, they continue to this day to be at the core of some of the problems in the health services, resulting in the crazy stuff last year where the Minister, Deputy Mary Harney, offered consultants €240,000-plus a year on a consultant contract. Of course, most older consultants have jumped at this because they can now retire relatively quickly on a highly enhanced pension that somebody who has worked in the ordinary Civil Service for many years could only ever dream about. It has not quite brought them up to the level of judges but close to it.

It is difficult, in reading these Estimates, not to feel that this is a Government in its twilight months. All is chaos. Norms in regard to negotiation have been disregarded. Negotiation is always difficult and tough, and requires a lot of patience. We are historically in a post-Bertie Ahern era. He was perhaps too generous in negotiation, but he had the money to be generous and he decided to throw the money at it. That was a tactic and, for him, politically and for getting Fianna Fáil election results, it worked. That era is over. Our economy is pretty close to broke. The crazy part of what was done by the Government last week is that all of the parties in this House had agreed that the public pay bill needed to be cut, but that it could be done by agreement. Amazingly, from time to time, people in Fianna Fáil have spoken about Tallaght-style strategies. Here was a Tallaght-style strategy on offer, stating that if this could be done by negotiation, that was the way to do it.

I recalled in this House two weeks ago the two key points in the Northern talks - nothing is agreed until everything is agreed, and then we all jump together. Last week, we were on course for that kind of achievement. Now, it lines in ruins around us and I do not think it can be renegotiated until there is a change of Government because the Government is now bankrupt in terms of being able to deliver change.

See this speech in context