Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Mac Lochlainn for making that point. It is one we make during every budget and the situation is very insulting. I accept some of the things which were said in the spring statement. I accept that there is growth in the economy, and that is welcome. I accept that there are more people at work, and that is very welcome, but I question the quality of some of those jobs, including some of the public service jobs.

We all want to have hope for the future, but the economy has been stabilised at the expense of society.

The elephant in the room is the debt. That we are servicing a debt that is the equivalent of the entire education system is delaying the prospect of a recovery, one that is not just of the economy, but of our society. By "at the expense of society", I mean that various groups have been targeted in recent years: carers, students, lone parents in particular and some medical card holders. We have a new class of homelessness. This is damaging.

Everyone has been hit. The universal social charge, USC, which was introduced under the previous Government, the property tax and water charges have hit people's pockets. Equally damaging is the fact that we have failed to seize the once-in-a-generation opportunity to change fundamentally how we govern ourselves. In much of the public service reform, "reform" became code for "cuts". Our political reform was only superficial.

We must be ambitious about what kind of society we want for the future. We are a great country, but we are not great because of our politics or institutions. We are great because of the people and despite some of those institutions. We must change that situation and transform this country. There is a desire for this type of transformation.

The longer term vision requires us to grasp some issues that have not been adequately addressed. The Minister, Deputy Howlin, referred to not considering the economy in isolation, but in the wider global context. This is why I sought a debt conference. It is necessary. Consider the levels of debt in Italy, France, Belgium and even Germany.

We need a fiscal expansion into key areas if we are to build a better country and society. We need to take a longer term approach, one that cannot be about an electoral cycle. We need to see investment in, for example, retrofitting homes if we are to escape paying large amounts of hard cash under our climate change obligations. There must be investment in public transport and cities and towns must function in a way that is not wasteful of time and energy. Compared with many western European countries, some of which are our competitors, we are still in the ha'penny place in terms of broadband. This impacts on the economy.

We must invest in water, but what has happened to date has been wasteful. For example, there is a 25% leakage rate in Kildare. Using an educated guess, the centre of Dublin, Cork or possibly Limerick is where one will find leaks. One does not need meters to know this. One needs to find out how old the pipes are and put meters on either end of them. The Government did not go about this in a way that would get to the core of the problem.

I have often acknowledged that the Government inherited many of these problems, but we are not challenging the consensus among the big guys. We are seeing it again and again. That the big guys are being dealt with differently than people with mortgages or indebted small companies that are being chased around by banks is getting to people.

The Minister, Deputy Noonan, stated that what happened must never happen again and that the Government could not get back the €34 billion put into Anglo Irish Bank, but the Government did not ask for it. It is criminal that people are still paying for it. It is as if we took on the mortgage of the big house up the road, subsequently restructured it and were singing the restructuring's praises because we no longer had to pay as much as we believed we would. This is the spin, but we are still paying every penny of it as well as the interest. In response to a parliamentary question, the Minister told me: "The schedule for extinguishing the balance will be €500 million in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018." On 23 December, the first €500 million was borrowed and burned. He continued: "That will rise to €1 billion in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023. It will double again to €2 billion" per year from 2024 onwards until it is paid, which looks to be in 2034.

I am coming to a point about the relationship between this and that awful night when we turned the IOU into a sovereign bond. We have no way of knowing what the relationship was between IBRC and the Department of Finance on that night. In the Chamber, the Minister talked in glowing terms about IBRC's board and chief executive and IBRC was only being wound down so quickly for one reason. However, we were not told what the relationship was. This issue needs to be addressed in the House. Why was there a sudden urgency to liquidate IBRC? Was there even a relationship? Not even the senior management knew. Remember how Mr. Alan Dukes was told that afternoon; we saw it on Twitter. The question of the relationship is important. Many issues like that arise. According to Mr. John Moran's diary, he met Mr. Mike Aynsley on 1 and 2 August, but there are no notes from that high level meeting. How could it be that two days of meetings were held between the most senior people in the Department of Finance and IBRC and not even one note was kept?

Turning again to the big guys as opposed to the small guys, Mr. Denis O'Brien owed IBRC millions of euro. If he had a spare €45 million lying around, why was he not asked to use it to pay down his borrowings instead of using it to purchase a company that we have been told was a bit of a basket case? Why would the bank allow someone in such debt to use €45 million to expose himself further or did he know that Siteserv would quickly turn into something profitable?

The inquiry by KPMG relates to this debate. If we are to have hope for the future, we need to do things differently in terms of governance. We cannot ask the same people who were part of a deal to review that deal. It will not wash. The public knows this. I took great offence when the Taoiseach yesterday spoke about the accuracy of some of my questions and how they were written. It was beneath him and his office. He should correct that statement. There was nothing wrong with the questions I posed. What was wrong was that I was not getting answers. They had to be pulled out like hens' teeth. This is unacceptable.

I am concerned by section 31(2)(b) of the Freedom of Information Act 2014. Under it, where a member of the Judiciary is involved in a review or inquiry, freedom of information requests are out of bounds.

It is important that this issue is not just pushed off into the future and buried until 31 August, right bang in the middle of the silly season.

I am very hopeful about this country. The claim has been made on many occasions from the Government benches that those of us on this side of the House show no evidence of having hope. In fact, we do have hope, but we may well have a different vision for the type of Ireland we want to create. This is an opportunity to acknowledge that we should not dismiss things that are positive. Indeed, both of the Ministers, Deputies Richard Bruton and Simon Coveney, who are in the Chamber have been very much at the heart of driving some of the positive improvement we have seen. It is only fair that we acknowledge that. However, we should not be codding ourselves about any of the issues or tolerating spin; our discussions must be real. The Government would do well to remember that the public is wide awake and engaged with all of this.

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