Lucinda Creighton (Dublin South East, Renua Ireland) | Oireachtas source

I am pleased to have an opportunity to speak on this Bill. I am probably in a unique position in the House in believing that the proposed measures are not the correct course of action for the Government, the State and its citizens. It is unfortunate that a Member of the Oireachtas or, for that matter, anyone else who questions the almost automatic decision of the Government to reverse the financial emergency measures in the public interest legislation and introduce so-called pay restoration, will be pilloried for being anti-public sector.

I do not regard myself as being anti-public-sector in any way, shape or form. I have huge respect for the men and women who serve this country and our citizens in the line of duty, whether it is as members of An Garda Síochána, members of the Defence Forces, nurses or those who provide assistance to children with special needs, teachers, doctors or anything else. Right across the board, our departmental civil servants do very important work. I want hard-working public and civil servants to have the prospect of better pay and conditions and pay increases, but I do not believe everybody should expect a pay rise. I do not believe that, irrespective of how good or bad one is at one's job, one should be entitled to expect the same reward as a person who may be better at the job and work harder. We are taught throughout our education that hard work, enterprise and effort should be rewarded, but we introduce blanket pay deals by way of insider negotiation with certain vested interests. Many groups are not represented at the table; it is select groups or friends of the Government, if one likes, who get to sit at the table. It is not democratic or transparent and it is not right. It has resulted in a really bad culture throughout our public service. It has led to a bad culture in, for example, the HSE, because people are demotivated and demoralised. Whether they work hard or not, they can expect the same treatment under our system. That is fundamentally wrong.

When we talk about so-called "pay restoration", we should reflect on that phrase. What is pay restoration and what are we restoring? What is this restoration all about? It is ironic that today is "Back to the Future" day. It is the day Marty McFly was supposed to jump into the future. We were supposed to have shoelaces that tied themselves and all sorts of things that were predicted in the movie. I feel like it is "Back to the Future" when we are having this debate, albeit not much of one, on pay restoration. What do we want to restore? Are we going back to the Celtic tiger era? That is certainly the direction in which we are headed. There was such a scandal and outcry after the benchmarking experience, although not during it because, as many have commented, everyone wanted to be part of it. Who is going to turn down a pay increase, particularly one that is not predicated on any particular performance but is given automatically? That is what we are returning to. We are saying that we want these blanket pay deals. There is not even a pretence at benchmarking any longer; rather, we want to start spending what is not, unfortunately, anything other than borrowed money at this point. We want to do it, coincidentally, just before an election.

The FEMPI legislation was predicated on an emergency state in the national finances, and it is very convenient for the Government to announce that the emergency is over. While we have growth in the economy and are on the road to recovery, it is premature to declare the emergency over when we still have a deficit and continue to borrow to pay for all of our public services. The decision on the part of the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Brendan Howlin, to suddenly declare the emergency over is very much a subjective one, and it does not stand up to scrutiny when the State is still borrowing to pay for its day-to-day current costs. Social partnership was renounced by the larger coalition partner. It was renounced because it was a ready-up. I do not need to name the now-serving Ministers who attacked benchmarking and social partnership from the Opposition benches where I sat with them. Now in government and in a position to hand out money to curry favour with the unions and the other organisations sitting around the table, it is suddenly convenient for them to forget that rhetoric and leave it behind. Unfortunately, we have discovered that it was rhetoric rather than anything meaningful or substantive. It certainly does not appear to have been driven by any conviction. That is a real pity.

We had, and still have, an opportunity to change our attitude and approach to expenditure and the budgetary process. There is an opportunity to avoid the traps that previous Fianna Fáil Governments fell into, but the Government is, unfortunately, falling into them anyway. Last night, I was at a public meeting on the economy and the aftermath of the budget. One person pointed out that Fianna Fáil was really angry last week, kicking itself and put out by the budget because it wanted to have delivered it itself. It was a Fianna Fáil budget. It was a little bit of this and a little bit of that for everybody. That characterises the Lansdowne Road agreement, which is a little bit of something for everyone without any real strategic vision as to how the economy should be. It is a missed opportunity. We are back to election-driven spending patterns. We saw increases in spending, piecemeal tax cuts across the board and the announcement of the capital spending plan a couple of weeks before the budget, all of which was targeted at particular constituencies. It was designed to create a little offering, if not a whole lot, for everybody rather than to take tough or strategic decisions about what is best for our country.

What we should have had was a fully engaged budgetary process involving all members of the Oireachtas. We should have had a build-up to the budget and the capital programme over a period of months, with input from Ministers, of course, and their civil servants, naturally, as well as the other political parties and Opposition Deputies. That input should have been scrutinised and different options should have been teased out. Different priorities should have been suggested and there should have been a genuine and meaningful debate with expert input through the sectoral committees. Instead, we had Ministers come to the House to announce that certain groups would benefit from the lucky-bag approach with which we became so familiar under Fianna Fáil. It is a real shame.

We need to see real reform through this legislation, Government policy and the setting out of a new vision for the country. Unfortunately, we have not seen that. In fact, putting the Minister, Deputy Brendan Howlin, into a Department entitled "Public Expenditure and Reform" was something of an ironic step. It is clear that the task of the Minister was to ensure that there would be no reform. While there have been cuts, some of them swingeing, hugely regressive and damaging, there has been no real reform. One need only look at the much-feted review of public service allowances and premium payments. That process was an absolute disgrace and a waste of time. Of 1,100 allowances across the public sector included in the review, virtually none was removed or abolished. It is a significant indictment of the Minister and his Department. It proves beyond any doubt that there was never any intention to reform public services. We must remember in the House that public services are actually about delivering high-quality services to the public.

If we are serious about that, why are we intent on pumping our limited, borrowed resources into pay at the first glimmer of hope and recovery instead of into services that everyone claims he or she wants to improve? This is extraordinary when queues of older people, sick people and, often, dying people are lying on hospital trolleys. Those numbers will increase as the winter months pass, yet the Government has prioritised pumping €1 billion into pay and pensions through the Lansdowne Road agreement. That is wrong, and it divides workers in the public sector from those in the private sector.

I agree that people are taxed too much and that they do not have enough autonomy over how they spend their wages and provide for their families, but driving up wages through secretive pay deals like the Lansdowne Road agreement is not the way to solve that, rather, the way to achieve better quality of life and greater access to disposable income is through reductions in the personal tax burden. This would result in benefits for all workers, not merely public sector ones. Many of the latter have taken large hits in the past seven years, but so have private sector workers. People lost their jobs, took 40% or 50% pay cuts or had their weeks reduced to two days. Even worse, some were forced to emigrate. Increasing wages in the public sector will do nothing for these people. It will drive up wages in the private sector, which will only return us to the uncompetitive position of the mid-2000s. What sort of bananas economic agenda is that? Why is the Government intent on dividing the workforce, pitching the public sector against the private sector, when the obvious approach is to take steps that would benefit all workers?

Why has the Government refused to grasp the nettle of genuine reform of the public service? Performance reviews were much feted under the Croke Park agreement. After a few months, however, public servants pronounced that less than 1% of them needed to improve their performances. I believe the figure was 0.85%. What utter nonsense. What Deputy could claim not to need to improve his or her performance? In what workplace could one find that 99.15% of workers were performing fine? These reviews are shambolic, meaningless and a cosmetic exercise designed, as per usual, to tick a box instead of driving the sort of reforms, efficiencies and performances that we need in our public services. Why is the Government happy to go along with this charade? In particular, why is Fine Gael prepared to do this? Since the Labour Party is funded by the trade unions, we understand the incentive and the relationship on that side, but I am at a loss as to how the Fine Gael Party could go along with this.

We need independent performance reviews within our public service. We need to link pay to performance. People have been discussing this for 25 years or more. For the past seven years, the perfect opportunity has existed to do it, to recognise those outstanding public servants who do their best, come to work energised and want to contribute and see the best for their country. We could cherish their work and reward them for it while the person next to them who did not work hard or make the same commitment to the job would not be rewarded in the same way. This is the culture that we need to drive in our public service. This is the culture that the majority of hard-working public servants want, as they would have nothing to fear from it. Rather, they would be rewarded for their efforts.

Instead, we have despicable box-ticking exercises that allow Ministers to squander taxpayers' money in attempts to buy votes at election time. We saw it with Bertie, who has had a bit of a resurrection in the media in the past 24 hours. We saw the destruction that such policies wreaked in our economy and society. I am ashamed that the Government is essentially following the same course and seems to show no interest in learning from the mistakes of the past. This is disgraceful.

On a positive note, there are obvious and simple solutions that could transform our country, economy and society. One is to get rid of our dysfunctional and deliberately Byzantine tax system. Renua Ireland has proposed the most radical tax policy of any political party of the past 100 years. We advocate a flat tax. This would transform the country by encouraging and driving innovation and entrepreneurialism and, importantly, by rewarding work for all people who want to contribute and provide for their families.

Currently, there are many anomalies, for example, the multiple USC and PRSI rates and the two income tax bands. These anomalies create a complex system that disincentivises work. We have a large range of tax breaks that are primarily availed of by the very wealthy. Disincentives and traps in social welfare and the minimum wage prevent people from taking on additional hours and earning extra money. In many cases, these are disincentives to people seeking pay rises. If someone on the minimum wage gets a rise of €10 per week, he or she will pay more tax and actually lose net pay. What a bizarre situation for a country that claims that it wants to incentivise work. It must change, and Renua Ireland has a clear plan as to how to do that. Our way would be better than a return to the good old days of throwing money at problems, which is what Fianna Fáil-led Administrations did. They increased health spending threefold in a 15-year period, yet our health system is shambolic. I have a great deal of direct experience of this, personally through family as well as through the many constituents who contact me seeking help. Every other Deputy has had similar experiences.

If we want to change this situation, we must change the culture, reform the delivery of public services, stop throwing money at problems, start innovating and treat all of our workers fairly and equally. The best way to do this is through lower taxation that does not penalise work and that values all workers equally regardless of whether they are in the public or private sector.

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