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

We agree on the need for strategic investment, but there are serious questions about whether this fund can deliver such investment. Even if the Minister of State says he wants that to happen and acknowledges the need for regional development and the need to invest in areas such as social housing or vital infrastructure, the money people want to know the bottom line and what they will get out of the arrangement. This is also the problem with Deputy Deasy's proposal. While the Government and the Department of Finance might hopefully, because of this, say they must consider regional development in the allocation of investments and so on, the same private sector that has over-centralised in Dublin and a few urban centres will say, "Sorry, we are not interested," and the Government will be hamstrung because it has to have co-financing. That is the problem. We will still be hostages to what the private sector wants.

One of the issues on which I cut my political teeth was the Dún Laoghaire baths. We had what was supposedly an ideological argument about public-private partnerships. Most people just wanted something done on the site. They did not care whether the money came from private or public sources. The council at the time said it had to be done through a PPP because it was Government policy. We said that if it was a PPP, the private operator would insist on making so much money as a condition of its investment that the public would get nothing out of it, and that was exactly what happened.

The private company proposed a 19-storey office block when the people wanted a swimming pool. That is the problem, and it will be the problem with this fund. Even if there are good intentions, if projects are conditional on co-financing with the private sector, nothing may happen, or what happens may not be of any use to society.

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