Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

He is absolutely right about Coillte. What is being done in respect of Coillte is a disaster. There is always a movement of State assets, big and small. What is being discussed here is the sale of strategic State assets in large quantity. Two years ago the Labour Party would have thrown its hands in the air and said this was disgraceful. The Labour Party never ceases to amaze me. The Government will deny it is a firesale yet when one examines the documentation it is clear the sales will commence in 2013. As the Minister is aware the economic forecasts for 2013 are not good as there will suddenly be huge valuations on assets. What will the Government sell? I suspect it will be some generating plant. I have an open mind to see what will be put up for sale. Some has been sold in the past. We should keep some critical generation capacity. I note that Mr. Colm McCarthy said the generation capacity of certain assets should not be sold, therefore, I want to see what it is proposed to sell.

I am opposed to the sale of the retail side of Bord Gáis. If one was Minister for Social Protection one would find that the attitude taken by the State companies to ordinary people who run into problems paying their bills is much more constructive, more planned and fairer than that of the private companies. When a big hullabaloo was raised by Fine Gael and the Labour Party about electricity being cut off when I was in government, they did not realise that in a large number of these cases, a disproportionate number compared to the customer base, that it was being done at the behest of Airtricity. The physical cutting off was done by Electric Ireland, but the demand to do it arose from the non-payment of Airtricity bills. Before selling State assets it is important to consider what is being done.

The amount to be generated from the sale of State assets is a projected €2 billion. Some €1 billion worth of State assets is being sold because the Labour Party needed a fig leaf that it would create jobs out of the sale of State assets. When it could not the €2 billion it had promised out of the sale of State assets it said it would add another €1 billion to it and the people would not notice it. The people do notice. I wonder how much money will be got when one takes into account the pension fund deficits and calculates a multiple of the loss of the dividend. In other words, the value of an asset must be set against the income one would have earned from that asset, where one owns the asset and the income, whereas when one sells, one sells the goose that lays the golden egg, unless one gets a good multiple return.

Much play is made about the sale of Eircom. A mistake was made subsequent to the sale of Eircom in regard to the way the telecommunications sector was regulated - I am still very critical of that. The reality is that we got €6.4 billion in 1999, which is more than twice what we will get for the sale of a large number of assets.

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