Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

It is. We are 150% in favour of strategic investment. Indeed, it was part of our policy platform before the last election, and we were very glad when the Government talked about it. However, the difficulty is that there seem to be a whole series of caveats and qualifications about the need, essentially, to bring in the private sector and to make its investments conditional on getting the private sector on board. I believe the Government will face two problems in that regard. First, the private sector companies do not want to get on board in regard to things that are not sure-fire profit winners for them.

7 o’clock

This will cause real difficulty in actually getting projects going or finishing them, as we have seen with public-private partnerships, or where the deal we must do involves the public giving away way too much. We take all the risk and they take all the profit, as often happens with these PPPs. We do not know anything about it anyway because it is all surrounded by commercial secrecy. We cannot find any information until the whole thing goes belly-up. Those are real and serious problems and flaws at the heart of this legislation.

The section that allows the Minister to use this fund to bail out the banks is extraordinary. What was the ESM for? It is bad enough that we cannot get retrospective bank recapitalisation, but I thought the whole idea of the ESM was that we would never have to do this again because there would now be a fund across Europe that would ensure this did not have to happen. Actually, we discover that the Government is preparing again for massive bailouts. One of the things that is worth underlining when we are looking at all of this and when people mention the collapse of the National Pensions Reserve Fund from €24 billion to €6.9 billion, or whatever it is now, is that when the Government says, as it does with regard to social housing, that we cannot take on a project on a 100% basis because we can get double the amount if we get co-funding from the private sector, and that this is critical because otherwise it would be put on our balance sheet, is that the debt is the reason we are prohibited from borrowing more money to do this ourselves. We could use our money to leverage money and we would not need the private sector. The reason we cannot do it is the massive debt and the fact that we have a 120% debt-to-GDP ratio and a big deficit. We have all those things because we bailed out the banks. Otherwise, there would not be a problem. A country that does not have a massive debt on its back and a deficit, all of which were incurred because of the bank bailout, does not have those restrictions on it in terms of public investment. We have them, so we are required to essentially privatise or semi-privatise our investment programme because we bailed out the banks, incurred massive debts because of it and ran down our National Pensions Reserve Fund. That is the sort of vicious circle and vice grip the troika have got us in, which the previous and current Government have allowed them to do, such that we cannot engage in the public investment we really need in infrastructure, housing or balanced regional development. The idea that we would allow ourselves to do all that again is just crazy.

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