Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I put it to the Taoiseach that from day one the main concern of the Government has been to spin its role on a range of issues rather than showing form in terms of substance. Central to all this was the establishment of a Cabinet committee which was pompously titled the Economic Management Council. An army of advisers spent countless hours talking about the importance of the EMC, themselves and their political bosses. The reality is that the EMC has been a way of making the Cabinet and Government less relevant and far more centralised than the Constitution ever envisaged. The Constitution is very clear about the role of Government, that is, that it should be responsible to Dáil Éireann.

It is a fact that the EMC has never produced a fiscal strategy. There has been no new fiscal strategy for three years. It has never published a full economic strategy. If one listened to the Tánaiste, Deputy Burton, the Ministers, Deputies White and Coveney, and others, one would find it has been a way of keeping normal discussions away from Government and the public. The water debacle was a classic illustration of that. It provided for the €500 million for water meters, devoid of any accountability.

On the forthcoming campaign event, which has been called the spring statement, will the Taoiseach say whether the EMC will be taking the lead role on that? The spring statement is due to involve civil servants in writing the document. The Taoiseach has confessed that the document is primarily about setting out Fine Gael and Labour Party policies beyond the next election. Will he outline on what legal basis he is using significant amounts of Civil Service time to write a document which has no formal status? It is not a White Paper or Book of Estimates, it contains no financial resolutions and will be immediately superseded by the budget. Will he confirm that is the case?

For most of last year we had weekly exclusive stories on tax cuts about to be handed out by a very generous Government. Will the Taoiseach confirm the status of those stories? We read about them every day. Are they cleared by the Taoiseach and the EMC before being released? Is he keeping a list of them or will it be like last year where the leaks went far beyond anything that subsequently materialised in the budget?

The EMC decided four years ago to end the practice of providing detailed distributional impact information for budgetary proposals. It seems to me that the reason it did that was to save the Labour Party's blushes due to Fine Gael's very regressive approach to budgetary and fiscal changes and the unfair policies that were allowed to dominate. One would argue that this is very basic material. The Department of Finance has all that material and historically has always produced it. Will the EMC lift a ban on its publication when the spring statement is issued? Will we be allowed to see the full impact of the announced policies rather than just the ministerial spin?

I put it to the Taoiseach that by law all budget proposals should be prepared in light of an analysis and recommendations from the Fiscal Advisory Council. It is a legal position. Will the law be followed, for example, for the spring statement? If it is not, it will be transparently and purely an electoral event and Fine Gael and the Labour Party should be asked to reimburse the taxpayer for the costs. Article 28.4.1° of the Constitution states: "The Government shall be responsible to Dáil Éireann." Instead, the Dáil is treated essentially as a rubber stamp in all this.

Will the Taoiseach outline to the House the position of the Tánaiste, Deputy Burton, on the EMC? She pouted a lot prior to becoming Tánaiste and leader of the Labour Party about not being on the EMC and not being given access to its work. Some Ministers, such as Deputies Varadkar and White, have complained publicly about the role of the EMC and their lack of engagement with it. The Minister, Deputy Coveney, did previously but has gone rather quiet on the issue. What is the up-to-date position of the Tánaiste?

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