Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

The Minister talks about having better economic growth and says the worst is over. That is a like George Bush announcing "Mission accomplished" when he went to Iraq. The truth is that these numbers are purely speculative. He has not addressed the strategies that can bring us that growth, create the employment opportunities, give us the competitive infrastructures and bring down costs. That is the tragedy. Restoring confidence is vital to our recovery. People will not invest if they are fearful and they are fearful. The Minister has forecast that next year private investment will fall by 40%, a catastrophic figure. It illustrates that people are not confident the Government has a strategy that will bring this economy on a road where they can see where they are heading and have a credible belief in what is being done. We cannot break the cycle if investors and families do not have the confidence to go out and spend. That is the position we are in. One needs more than vacuous claims that the worst is over, one needs to see action, a strategy, a plan. That is the void that has been left unaddressed.

Front-line services have been hit hard in this budget because the Minister was not willing to face up to the much more radical change demanded by the McCarthy report. That is the incredible part of it. The Minister commissioned a report that demanded that he address issues. Some 43 rationalisations were identified by the McCarthy process and not one of them has been taken on. I suppose that is not surprising because in last year's budget the Minister announced that there were to be 30 rationalisations involving 41 agencies. What happened? Half of them have not been touched. The total savings to date from those rationalisations is €3.4 million, less than 1.5% of the budgets involved. The Minister has failed to create the tools to make rationalisation happen. He has failed to move staff from where they are not needed to where they are needed. He does not have a system for doing that and he does not have the tools to give managers the power to rationalise the way they do their business. He has left it to the 11th hour to try to address those changes. We come back to this budget and see that the focus has been on the front line and not on the changes we should have seen. These changes will be hard on people.

The Minister is asking people on the drug refund scheme to pay €120 per month whereas at the last general election the amount was €85. He is asking people on medical cards to pay 50 cent per prescription. In the UK when such a cost was introduced it exempted the lowest one-third of the income profile. Patients do not decide what is prescribed on their medical chit, doctors decide that. That patients on €180 per week, according to the means test, are being asked to pay up to €10 per month will not save us on our drugs bill. To do that one has to be radical about using generic drugs and look at new prescribing practices, not asking the weakest in our community to contribute.

The Minister is asking carers who are saving the State a fortune to take a cut of €8.50 in the amount of money they receive. Where is the fairness in that? He is asking widows and invalids to take that cut, simply because they are under the age of 65. Why were such people not exempted? The value of the work of a carer, for which the Minister will pay €212 per week, runs to €1,000 per week. That is what a carer means to a family, and it does not mean simply a monetary saving. It means that the patient is in an environment in which he or she wants to be and getting the care they want.

The Minister needed more imagination. He has hit people who are down. The fact that he has hit child payments is very short-sighted because young families have borne the brunt of the recession. They are the people who paid excess prices for houses in the upswing and are now in negative equity. Some 35,000 of them face repossessions. There are 350,000 families in negative equity and the Minister's gesture to them is inadequate, it is pathetic. Where is the work of the Government group that was address these problems?

We were told in the programme for Government that this would be a priority but this has not been reflected in the budget. What other group is more important than families who are under threat of losing their homes? We expected to see provision for them and we expected to see the needs of the victims of this recession addressed. The Minister has provided for 26,000 job placements for the 420,000 who are out of work and this is welcome but far more welcome would be a radical economic plan to drive employment growth. Fine Gael's economic plan to do this builds to a potential of 175,000 jobs after four years. That is the sort of vision we needed, the sort of commitment that was possible for the Minister to take on. He has short-changed people who ought to have been at the heart of this budget. Time and again we have heard the former Minister for Finance, Deputy Cowen and again as Taoiseach, talking about the seismic shift of reform in the public service. We have heard all the rhetoric but it has produced nothing. Today we see the evidence of this. The McCarthy report set out cuts that could be achieved in the area of social welfare and there was a shock and a sharp intake of breath from people who hoped we would not be reduced to such action. The report also looked at areas other than social welfare; it considered efficiencies in the spending system and in rationalisation. The Minister has adopted none of the rationalisation. What is worse, he has adopted 42% of the savings on the social welfare side but only 25% in the non-social welfare areas. This was the difficult area, the area that required Ministers to apply a bit of imagination, to actually invest their intelligence in changing the way they ran their system, to get more with less. The Minister shirked that responsibility to make those reforms and as a result it is the front line, those low-paid public servants who will pay from the very first euro. It is people on social welfare under 66 years who will pay. The Minister has asked them to pony up because he was not willing to confront the sort of change that is needed.

The Government should have adopted each proposal in the McCarthy report as it came, and be seen to be driving a rationalisation programme from the outset, sitting down and negotiating with trade unions from the very start and announcing that this was part of a jobs strategy. It should have appealed for solidarity from all those working in the public service as well as the private sector in order to create an employment strategy. Instead the Government has disastrously mishandled those negotiations and it has left us with the public service that is angry and demoralised. This is a tragedy. Most people I talk to in the public service know that costs in the public service will need to be cut if we are to trade our way out and rebuild a strong economy that creates employment. They know that but they want to be part of a strategy that shows solidarity with something bigger that is being created, a real employment strategy. The Minister did not go to them with an employment strategy in which they could believe, in which they could see that their sacrifice was going to be contributing to a bigger picture, an agenda of change, not just in the public service but reinvesting in the economy and reinventing the economy. The Minister went to them with a demand for pay cuts alone but where was the wider strategy to bring down costs, where was the commitment to confront boardroom pay, the rip-off that we see in our shops every day? Where was the commitment to drive down utility prices, to freeze Government charges? Where was the commitment to cut commercial rents that are killing businesses by the day? The Minister needed to show that the effort he was asking for from public servants - which was valid - was matched by an equal determination to confront costs right across the economy. We have lots of people in the sheltered sector who are not confronting those costs and who are making businesses go to the wall. If the Minister could have enlisted people's support behind such a strategy, they would respond but the Minister lacked the ambition and the determination to take on those interest groups who have been too cosy, too close to Government in the past. This is what has let us down. We have been left with damaging cross-fire between the public and the private sectors. The public sector will never succeed without a vibrant private sector and the private sector will never succeed unless the public sector can be reformed and become more effective. We work together. We needed a sense of togetherness and willingness to confront these problems together and instead the Minister has left a residue of bitterness and division which is doing us no good.

It was vital that people should regard this budget as being fair. We expected much more in terms of asking people who are better-off to contribute to the cost. Fine Gael proposed that those earning over €75,000 would pay the full 4% PRSI levy all the way up but that was not adopted. We proposed radical reform in pension relief, targeted at the higher paid and that has not been adopted. We proposed the wiping out of many of the tax shelters but that has not been adopted.

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