Joe McHugh (Donegal North East, Fine Gael)

I concur with the previous speaker on the lack of content or proposals on how to pave the way forward. However, I have picked out one consistent term used by many of the Cabinet and its backbench supporters, namely, fairness. One hears on radio and from Cabinet members that everything will be done in the interests of fairness. On the second day of this debate, I have given a little time to thinking about the concept of fairness. Having sought to establish where is the emphasis, I note it is firmly on "how" and "when". The "when" is quite simple as the Government intends to introduce a budget on 7 December and a finance Bill in January. As for the "how", the Government is considering broad sectoral areas, including taxation, growth stimuli, job creation and public expenditure cuts, which comprise the macroeconomic element of this debate.

In respect of the "what", vagueness starts to appear as to the effects on monetary protection, standards of living, career progression, unemployment or pension protection. Furthermore, as a Deputy representing a rural constituency, I note there is something of a grey area on where this fairness will be introduced in respect of the relationship between the core and the periphery. If one considers the core-periphery model that operated during the good times, whereby money went to the large population centres, I am worried about funding for capital programmes in rural areas with regard to health services or physical infrastructure.

The Tánaiste must take a strong interest in who will be affected. Will students who already have emigrated consider this to be fair? The Tánaiste should ask engineering graduates who was obliged to depart for Brisbane whether they will be considering the possible fairness of this budget. How will parents with children with special needs who need 24-hour care or those with children with spina bifida who have services at present be treated in respect of fairness? It is possible they will lose hours of care. What about farmers on €12,000 per annum who may face an increase of registration fees to €3,000? Were such farmers to have three children, this would take €9,000 out of their wage income straight away, thereby leaving them to live on €3,000 a year. Is their predicament fair? What about the 300,000 mortgage holders who may enter mortgage default in the next two years? Where will they sit with regard to the Government's concept of fairness?

Such fairness does not exist and this is the first premise that must be completely negated in this debate. The Government's model of fairness is dysfunctional. Its philosophy of government since 1997 has been to throw money at any problem that arose without evaluation of outcome or cost-benefit analysis. This was because it was politically expedient and because it fulfilled the Fianna Fáil mantra of vote-getting. This is what happened and within the guts of two months, all this money will be pulled back even though the Government has created a high dependency social model based on high costs. In addition, for the next six to seven weeks, people will be absolutely scared out of their wits as to how this will affect their lives in January or February.

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