Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

I am glad to have the opportunity to speak on the budget. We should lay out the direction we want to take in the future. Having risen to great heights in terms of expenditure and services and having improved services beyond recognition, we are all anxious to maintain those services as far as possible and to protect those who depend on them.

Listening to the debate in the Dáil yesterday, I was interested to see Ministers, one after another, point out something we had been pointing out when in Government, that 80% of current expenditure goes on health, education and welfare. When people were coming up with all sorts of handy solutions last year and the year before, we kept pointing to the fact that, by definition, any cutback made in expenditure inevitably hits health, education and social welfare. Large numbers of the recipients of the payments in those Departments are the poorer people in society.

If we want to work towards a future, we must realise that austerity alone will not resolve the problem. I have a theory I call the three fives. Take, for example, a budget deficit of approximately €15 billion. A debt of €5 billion would be sustainable, particularly if there was a good element of capital expenditure. That would be the 3% that could be borrowed on a sustainable level, leaving €10 billion to be raised. Some €5 billion of that would have to be got by curtailing expenditure or raising new taxes. The final €5 billion would have to be got through growth. Any government that would try to raise the €10 billion through taxes and austerity, would find it was continually chasing its tail, because as it cut expenditure, the tax take would reduce. What this budget lacks is a coherent plan as to how we will create growth within the economy and how we will encourage people to become economically active and do that in a reasonable and sustainable way.

On the other hand, a large number of Deputies sit on the benches up behind me. They go on all the time about our fiscal sovereignty and oppose cutbacks of any type and any extra taxes, yet they never tell us how they would bridge the gap. Whenever they are challenged on that issue, they come up with false sums and move moneys around within State funds to try and give the illusion of coming up with free money. I often wish they could be given two or three weeks on the Government benches, because no more than the Government that is in power today, they would face the reality that most of their handy theories do not work in practice when in Government and realise that the easy answers of the magic money have no basis. The Fine Gael Party when in Opposition used to speak about the €4 billion of waste that could be eliminated with the stroke of pen, without ever looking at the Estimates to point out where the waste existed that could be easily eliminated.

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