Martin Ferris (Kerry North-West Limerick, Sinn Fein)

A similar spin has been applied to the issue discussed today, the sale of State assets. We have been told that the Government has now agreed the shape and scale of the asset disposal programme, which is now set at the more ambitious target of €3 billion. It can be recalled that the programme for Government set a limit of €2 billion on the value of the sell-off. In itself, that flew in the face of commitments given by the Labour Party during the election to oppose any such a move. The party's election manifesto clearly stated that "Labour is opposed to short-termist privatisation of key State assets, such as Coillte or the energy networks." Now, not only do we have a Labour Minister, Deputy Howlin, in charge of the sale but we are also being told that even the compromise agreed, that the original €2 billion would all be reinvested in public job creation programmes, has been abandoned. Now we are told that the Government has secured agreement that a third of those proceeds will go to reinvestment in the economy.

What we now have in place of the original proposal to sell off €2 billion of valuable State assets built up over a long and hard period is a new proposal that €3 billion of assets will be sold and that €2 billion of the proceeds will go not towards any programme to create employment but into the black hole of the bank debt. That is a major escalation of both the scale of the sale and a major reversal of the stated policy on what the proceeds would be used for. Nevertheless, in a reply to questions from me and Deputy Browne on this last week, the Minister claimed that all of this, resulting from consultations with the troika, represented a remarkable advance.

How is it a remarkable advance, even if it were the case that the privatisation agenda was being exclusively driven by the troika, something I do not accept is the case given that clearly there are ideological supporters of privatisation within the Cabinet and the author of the report on State assets, Professor McCarthy, makes no secret of his hostility to public investment of almost any sort other than paying him and his chums large consultancy fees? Even if all of this was done at the behest of the troika, it would still represent a significant climbdown on the part of the Government. It is not an advance but another retreat to go along with all the others which are dressed up as something else in the progress report.

To see what the sale will mean, we can look at what happened when Eircom was privatised. That company had received significant inputs of State investment and was worth €8.4 billion at the time it was sold off. Following its stripping by the vultures, it has been reduced to a current net value of just €39 million. That is what will happen to Bord Gáis and to any other State company that is broken up and sold. They will be cherry-picked and the State will be left not only with a loss in having divested itself of profitable parts for a once-off payment but also with the responsibility for the maintenance of the infrastructure, for example, the Bord Gáis network having to supply gas which will be sold by private companies that will buy the gas supply section of the company.

The short-term outlook of the sale of State assets and the long-term loss it will represent is starkly illustrated by the fact that three of the key targets of privatisation - Coillte, the ESB and Bord Gáis - have paid just under €2 billion to the State in dividends alone over the past ten years. That is apart altogether from wages, tax and their overall contribution to the wider economy. The logical and economically positive action would be to retain these wholly in State ownership and develop them as key parts of a programme of publicly led job creation. There is vast potential in all three companies in areas of the economy that will become ever more important over the next decade.

It is nonsensical to be selling off key players in the energy sector when the emphasis of State energy policy is on decreasing our dependency on imported fossil fuels and replacing them with renewable sources of power such as wind, wave, biomass and tidal energy. That is why Sinn Féin is proposing the coming together of State companies to maximise the potential for growth in those areas with the emphasis on job creation, in co-operation with the private sector but with the State energy companies, as well as Coillte and Bord na Móna, as central and more proactive agents.

With Coillte specifically, it is worth pointing out again the potential which the forestry sector has if it could be better managed, which I acknowledge has not been the case. However, that is not a reason or an excuse for it to be broken up and its forestry sold to private companies. The Swiss example was highlighted last week as a potential model. Switzerland has approximately twice the amount of forestry of this State but employs 120,000 people directly and indirectly compared with less than a fifth of that number here. The Swiss state is a key actor and owns over 70% of the forestry. It is clear there is massive potential given the right policies and focus. Among the potential areas is the use as input for biomass of wood products which are not otherwise used in timber production.

We also know that privatisation is not only economically a bad idea but also that large-scale privatisation of the sort being proposed here leads to political and financial corruption. We have seen that in the creation of the new oligarchies in Russia, for example, where former devotees of the same ideology once espoused by some of the Labour Party Members used their positions within the Stalinist state to move in on valuable assets. It seems the oligarchs are now well set to meld robber capitalism with undemocratic Stalinist politics, something that might ring a bell with some of the backbenchers in the party of the Tánaiste and the Minister in the light of their own dissatisfaction.

We do not have quite the same dynamic here. What we do have is a former Taoiseach who has been prominently connected with a group which has previously expressed an interest in acquiring Coillte's forestry assets. He also visited China, apparently in pursuit of possible investors in such a project. The Chinese state investment corporation has expressed interest in Irish forestry assets. It will be interesting to see who will be the bidders when Coillte comes up for auction. It will also be interesting to see if we will again be subject to the type of shady dealings which attended previous privatisations, as it seems they closely complement one another.

The previous position of the Labour Party, when in opposition, on the sale of State assets was one I applauded. However, the impact in going down the road it is taking in selling off State assets will be felt by the people for a very long time; it will do enormous damage to our control of the public sector.

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