Shane Ross (Dublin South, Independent)

That is correct.

My immediate reaction to this Bill is one of approval because it is important that the idea of public expenditure is taken in isolation and addressed. Whatever the ideological view people take on public expenditure, there is undoubtedly a problem and a need to readdress those difficulties, which have been the cause of our deficit.

The Minister, Deputy Howlin's, speech was very strong on aspirations and very low on reality. It was peppered with the jargon I recognise from a lengthy period of dealing with the Department of Finance. It is rather odd that the person who has been asked to come in here has had the contents of his speech so greatly influenced by the problem he ought to be addressing. By that I mean that the Department of Finance has obviously had a huge influence on the break-up of the Department as proposed in the Bill. This is a clear conflict of interest, a difficulty which has not been overcome in the Bill but is obvious within it, and the Department of Finance, one of the great problems of public expenditure, is the victor in the battle between the old Department and the new. As other speakers have said, it is clear from the powers given to the new Ministry that the Department of Finance, on the whole and in general, retains a great deal of its old powers.

It is the Department of Finance, after all, which presided over the excesses in public expenditure we have witnessed for many years, particularly under the last Government. While the aspirations are there, the reality is that the Minister's speech is disappointing. There is a lot of familiar old hat in it, but history suggests there is not a great deal of hope that those aspirations will become reality. I say this as one who has done a good deal of work in looking at what has happened to public expenditure in recent years and at the extraordinary waste of public money that was tolerated in particular by the Department which is entrusted with seeing that public money is not wasted.

One of the great problems is not addressed in the Bill, nor in the Minister's speech, namely, that it is not just the Department of Finance itself but the model of social partnership to which we have clung for so long that is at the root of our difficulties. Social partnership, so fashionable for so long in this and the other House and among all political parties, bears a heavy responsibility for the mess in which we find ourselves and for the current budget deficit. There is absolutely no doubt that the runaway wages we saw in the period of the first benchmarking deal were a result of the social partnership model which virtually everybody worshipped for so long. There we saw a once-off deal which gave public servants an increase of 8.9% regardless of performance, although it was in theory tied to performance. History suggests that our aspirations to cut public expenditure, or to ask the public service unions to pull back their demands, will not be successful.

That benchmarking deal was won as a direct result of social partnership and of the social partners seizing power in this land over those who were democratically elected in this House. The deals were not ratified by this House but rather bypassed the House. The deals were excessive and we are now, partly through the Croke Park agreement but in other areas as well, trying to row back on them in rather obscure ways. There is no recognition in the Minister's speech that the social partnership model has failed. What happened under that model is still happening - to a lesser extent, perhaps, but it is still happening.

Successive social partnership deals were agreed from 1987 to 2010-11, but they did not begin as they ended. They began in 1987 with the then Taoiseach, Mr. Haughey, agreeing a deal that was flagged between him and the unions. However, they developed into something much more sinister and dangerous. They developed into a programme for Government which interfered in the democratic rights of this House. The social partners became the Patricians in this nation, deciding on policies way outside pay deals. They decided on policies on foreign aid, policies to do with the Irish language - all of this was in social partnership deals of various sorts. Some of these agreements ran to 120 pages. The result was that the social partners got too powerful and started spending other people's money, that is, taxpayers' money, and this House ratified that public expenditure on the direction of the Government which negotiated the deals.

It is my view that the main culprit in social partnership was not the trade unions but IBEC. The unions did what they have always done and which it is their job to do, namely, to negotiate the best possible pay deal for their members. Unfortunately, they negotiated more than that because the employers were a busted flush who capitulated at the last minute on every pay deal, particularly those relating to public service pay. As a result the model appeared to flourish by ensuring industrial peace. It delivered industrial peace but at a cost the Exchequer could never have afforded and for which we are paying now.

After the Oireachtas was bypassed in this way the social partnership monster got bigger and bigger and a whole partnership industry developed which involved an enormous amount of public expenditure. Social partnership quangos developed in the form of all types of semi-State bodies. Trade union leaders were then appointed to the boards of these quangos and rewarded. Rights commissioners were appointed and given jobs at €470 a day in order to keep this particular engine on the road. At the same time the nation was spending money it could not afford in the grip of a social partnership model which is now discredited.

I would have liked to hear the Minister say more in his speech about the Croke Park deal. Nobody knows the status of that deal and whether the trade unions are in fact delivering on modernisation. Nobody could blame them for not delivering on modernisation because they have never been expected to do so. Every single time they have eyeballed the Government on this issue, the Government has rolled over and the unions have won. This legacy of social partnership is one of the reasons public expenditure is so high in this country. It would be more honest had the Minister said that the model has failed, that the Croke Park agreement is a legacy of that model and that we will now be moving in a different direction.

Instead he pussyfoots around with aspirations of reform but very little delivery. Why does he think we have seen such problems in bodies like FÁS, CIE and the HSE? Does he not recognise that FÁS was a problem structurally as well as being subject to inefficiencies, neglect, negligence and a great degree of malpractice both at board level and in its training programmes? Unfortunately, the Leas-Cheann Comhairle has indicated that my time is up.

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