Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Alas, only five minutes. I will gallop through as many of the comments as I can. I thank everybody for his or her sincere comments.

Deputy Sean Fleming likes to disaggregate things as if one could make the staff reductions and the savings in staff reductions without the Haddington Road agreement. The whole idea behind the extra hours worked is that we can then provide the same service with fewer people. We cannot do this without the Haddington Road agreement. The staff reductions, including not only getting rid of numbers of whole-time workers but also agency workers and so on, require the Haddington Road agreement, which is why it is such an important tool.

The Deputy made much of the percentage reduction in our targets. Before the last election, our party wanted to see a reduction on the basis of a 50:50 balance for expenditure and taxation. Fine Gael had a different view; it had a 3:1 policy. On page 11 of the budgetary documentation for 2013 it is much closer to 50:50 than 3:1 or even 2:1. It is interesting to note that in the Fianna Fáil national recovery programme it was two thirds spending cuts to one third taxation. It also wanted a very significant additional cut in social welfare, the very items the Deputy listed. The cuts would have been much deeper had Fianna Fáil's policy been implemented, but that is the beauty of opposition. A very senior and significant member of the Deputy's party said it was not captured by the tyranny of consistency; therefore, it can have a policy that is appropriate to the day.

Deputy Mary Lou MacDonald is just wrong about the budgetary process. The process, as Deputy Stephen S. Donnelly acknowledged, has been transformed, although it has not yet been fully embraced. The data are there to have a much more meaningful analysis of expenditure.

Deputy Catherine Murphy referred to the lack of time. All of these Estimates were referred to individual committees which Ministers attended them and they went through the Estimates line by line. It is much more useful and utilitarian if one wants to go through the social welfare or education budget to do so with the line Minister and the officials of that Department who are more seized of the individual component parts and subheads. That is why we have the committee system and it works in that way.

Deputy Mary Lou MacDonald talks about management capacity. We do need management. I make no bones about having proper management oversight and transparency in the way the public service works because it was not a cohesive whole until my Department had a cohesive look at it because it was part of a Department of Finance that always had other priorities. The restructuring and reform of the public service are now a dedicated front and centre priority of a significant Department led by a Minister. That is important. I reject the notion that the social economy is not at the heart of what we are doing. I refer constantly to the citizen.

It is very hard to be right. Deputy Mary Lou MacDonald says she is drowning in data. Every time I attend a committee meeting Deputy Stephen S. Donnelly wants more data. All of these are important.

To respond to Deputy Richard Boyd Barrett, we are creating real jobs, an additional 2,000 real jobs a month. That is after losing 250,000 jobs in the three years before we came into office. That is important.

I am sceptical when Deputy Stephen S. Donnelly wants to reduce the pay bill but does not want to cut wages or numbers.

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