Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein)

Last night's speech by the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Howlin, begged the following question. What on earth has he done to the Labour Party? The Minister waxed lyrical about change and told us that all had changed, changed utterly. However, if he cared to stray back to the real world he would see nothing of significance has changed since the Government took office. A year on and the same old controversy about politicians' pay, pensions and allowances continues. The scandal about payment for Government advisers and a small coterie of public servants continues. The Government talks the talk of reform but it will not walk the walk.

Any government that increases flat taxes and charges for the low paid, will cut the contributory State pension later this year, and cuts services in schools and hospitals while protecting its own big pay cheque has a brass neck to preach about change. The Minister promised us a forthcoming book on the Labour Party to mark its centenary, which I am sure will be a great read. I hope the Labour Party's wholesale capitulation to a Fine Gael agenda in this Government is not reduced to a footnote. The Minister's speech last night was flippant, inaccurate and an ultimately tragic attempt by the Labour leadership to justify its decision to ignore its party policy on the retention of commercial State assets in public ownership - at the command of Fine Gael's small government diktat. Selling off successful self-financing State assets is a bad deal for citizens and a bad deal for the economy, as Labour Party Deputies well know.

Treating the profitable elements of Bord Gáis and the ESB as cash sources for bad bank debt write-down makes no economic sense and reflects the kind of short-term policy and political decision making that got us into this crisis in the first place. The debts that are to be cleared are those of toxic private banks and are not the people's debts. However, the Government proposes to sell off the people's assets - public, valuable assets - to write down that very debt. State assets under any rational government should be used to drive the economy, create sustainable jobs and provide upskilling and training opportunities. Previous State asset sales provide positive proof that privatisation of utilities is not the panacea for the perfect competition the Government desires. The sale of these assets will not make any meaningful dent in the national debt which could reach €200 billion at its peak in 2015.

NewERA, the brainchild of Fine Gael and now lauded by Labour, is in reality a clearing house for privatisation and this round of asset disposal is simply a period of apprenticeship. Today it is the generating assets of the ESB and the energy business of Bord Gáis Éireann. Tomorrow, perhaps, it will be the networks and the interconnectors because, no doubt, in the perverse logic of the Government at some stage it will concoct some argument, however implausible, that they are not strategic either.

If the Government were serious about leveraging State companies to the benefit of the economy and citizens it would take a completely different and changed approach. Ministers would work directly with commercial semi-State companies to deliver a strategic job creation and training programme under the helm of the Taoiseach and the Joint Committee on Jobs, Social Protection and Education. If the Government were serious about leveraging the value of the semi-State companies, all commercial semi-State dividends paid to the coffers of the State would be reinvested into employment activation and training measures. During the past ten years the ESB and Bord Gáis Éireann have paid more than €2 billion to the State in dividends. That is double what the Government proposes to invest in job creation.

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