Shane Ross (Dublin South, Independent)

I realise the difficulties the Government is facing. It has been left in a difficult situation where cuts are essential but investment in infrastructure is also essential. It is in an unenviable position. It has made plain where cuts must be made and to some extent that is the easy part. In theory, it is easy to draw a line through the metro project, Thornton Hall prison and other plans. There might be local difficulties but it must be done.

The difficult part is the investment. In that area, the Government has shown it does not have a great deal of scope or imagination and does not hold out much hope. I take the point that the report emphasised the potential of public private partnerships but it is only potential and I do not see an enormous degree of optimism that it will be able to raise money in that sphere. Private money requires profit; it does not look for any social or community benefit. There are very few investors who want to invest in Ireland at the moment; that is the reality. There are very few who want to invest in Europe, as we saw from the German bond auction yesterday. The lack of hope and optimism in that area in this report and in the Minister's speech is ominous.

I note with alarm the rather desperate way the report looks towards pensions. There was a time when the National Pensions Reserve Fund was looked upon as a source for investment in infrastructure in the areas we have now cut as a result of Government policy. Those coffers are now empty and in this report once again the pensions industry and the pensions pot is being looked at as a way to rescue the Government. The report says it will make offers to pension funds to invest in the infrastructure it cannot fund itself. That is a desperate situation that is based on the alarming realisation that the money will not come from anywhere else. The State is out of money and so the pension funds are being eyed in exactly the same way as when the State applied the 0.6% levy.

It is a dangerous precedent to look at pension funds as a source of funds for State projects. We are not going down the road of confiscation but we are going down the road of pressure. If we start to pressurise pension funds to put money into projects that are for the benefit of communities, they are being asked to deny their commercial mandate. Once they do that, they are betraying the pensioners who put money into them. It is a difficult conflict to resolve but it is very dangerous for those pensioners if the pension funds go into non-commercial, Government directed projects for the good of the community. The community must be looked after but it is wrong to look after them from private pension funds if they are put under non-commercial pressure to do it.

The other area where investment is most important is multinationals. It is indicative and depressing that the report mentions education and health as priorities but it admits that there will be cuts in third level education because there is not enough money to fund all educational requirements. What does that mean? Multinationals, I suspect, will look upon us with a more jaundiced view than in the past. They will look at the education infrastructure and say we are not educating our people for the jobs they have created here. There was evidence of this recently when the American Chamber of Commerce came out and revealed there were at least 2,000 unfilled jobs because the education had not been provided at third level to train people for those posts.

Broadband is another area that must be examined if multinationals are to continue coming here. If the word goes out, and we have been lucky so far that it is not more widespread, that broadband in this country is not up to scratch, the multinationals will look elsewhere.

An alarming phrase in the report pertains to the setting up of a next generation broadband task force. Using the weasel words used when one is not going to fulfil one's requirements, the report states the purpose of the task force is to discuss the optimal policy environment required to facilitate the provision of high speed broadband across the country. This means a task force has been set up to solve a problem it cannot solve. It is considering projects that will not be developed in the timescale in question. This is an amber light, a danger signal that there is no commitment to broadband provision. There was no such commitment by the previous Government. I brought forward two Private Members' Bills on the matter.

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