Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

The Deputy could say control, but that is just giving my perspective. I just wanted to make the point before Deputy Broughan left that it is in that spirit that I wish the Members opposite well.

I take up the opportunity the Taoiseach has provided. He said that he and his Government will be willing to do things differently. In doing things differently, we might start by looking at some things we are doing well in our State and think how we could do more of that rather than always looking to see what we are bad at. I accept we need to change what we are bad at but the mental shift that might come from seeing the State in a different way might actually lead to a better outcome.

It is in that spirit that I comment on certain points of the partnership Government draft programme that I managed to download this morning and have been reading throughout the day in a positive perspective. I make one broad point. I agree with the assessment on page 12 of the document that as well as the immediate tasks we have in terms of building houses, providing jobs and community health-care systems, we have an opportunity to change the way we approach big long-term challenges we have. In some ways we need to change not just the nature of the partnership or politics in here, but we need to have a wider partnership change in looking at those big long-term issues.

We need to involve the public service and civil society. I have heard the Social Democrats propose this in some of their policy documents. We need to bring in other people, open debate and change the nature of partnership in that sense. Why not take that idea? There are places throughout this document where that sort of idea is repeated in terms of wider consultation.

I know we have done it before. Obviously we did it in the late 1980s when we got out of a State crisis by starting a partnership model. That evolved to the more recent incarnation. I have not been closely involved for the past five years and so perhaps I am not up to speed with the latest developments. However, it evolved with complex pillars. People can disagree or otherwise about the nature of partnership, benchmarking and so on.

We need an evolution in that sort of partnership process. It should be more diverse, flexible and directly connected to citizens in different ways rather than just the official organs of partnership.

We attended the dialogue in Dublin Castle last summer that was an example of innovation. In the break-out session with the then Minister, Deputy Alan Kelly, there was a good conversation involving Deputy Cowen and others. We realised the lack of connection between the citizen and the State, or the lack of a sense that the State belongs to all our citizens, is one of the biggest difficulties. It is hard to get things done or changed because of that sense of disconnect. It is the wider sense of partnership change that I support and welcome. I look to use it as we consider in a two-year period some of these long-term challenges.

That period is two or three years, however long the Government lasts. It is subject to there not being an economic crisis internationally and our economy being kept on track. We can expect a very significant increase in the amount of funding that would be available for large capital projects, so we should use that preparation period for a real expansion of the budget, and the capital budget in particular, that might be possible to try to get consensus and buy-in from a range of different actors to get this right. It would honour the 100th anniversary of our Parliament and not just the 100th anniversary of the State.

There are a number of issues that must come under long-term consideration. In some cases there is both a short and long-term aspect. One of the issues that should have been listed on page 12 is the development of a national spatial plan. In negotiations we had briefly with Fine Gael and others in Government Buildings, I recall officials from the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government saying they expected to present a national spatial plan in the early part of 2017. It is a difficult task, and to a certain extent we really got that wrong 15 years ago. In the early 2000s we did an infrastructure investment plan and a spatial plan afterwards, so it was not in the right order. A decentralisation plan ignored any spatial planning completely.

Deputy Ross is now Minister responsible for transport and he will have to work on that with Deputy Coveney on the housing side. They will have to figure out how it will work and how we will get over the political temptation that every Deputy from every constituency wanting it to benefit his or her constituency. How will we manage that spatial plan in which we will not just come up with the same old wish list and 20 or 30 centres of growth? How will we grow Limerick and make it a real centre of development, changing it so that more than 3% of the population lives in the city? We will have to do the same in Dublin and Cork. In this two or three-year period, we need to get the people and politicians of Limerick thinking about how it can really evolve and develop. We can say the same about Waterford or any of the big cities. One of the tasks of any Government in this Parliament is to think about how we can do spatial planning well, as we have not been good at it. Maybe by consulting more widely, mixing it up and putting the responsibility back into the regions - perhaps revising the nature of regional governance, which I would like to see done right - we could help make it happen.

There is an interesting challenge to which I wish to contribute. The document rightly sets out that we must do a climate plan in the next six months and we must also do a dialogue with the people to get wider buy-in and understanding of the radical change we need to make if we are going to do anything seriously on the climate issue. It is a tough timetable. If we are going out for consultation, we must get away from the tick-box consultation we have tended to use over the years. We need genuinely to empower local communities and put the big questions to people. We must ask if they really want to be part of this, how they want to do it and what it means. We must look through it as an opportunity to do real development and create economic activity. As a party we are very interested in trying to contribute to that and putting some creative thinking around how the State engages with communities to make us really good at that.

There is difficulty in terms of urgency. Some of the stuff we have to do immediately, while some of it is long-term. The paper rightly sets out that we have to get consensus regarding investment in health and education. Which party here said that it would take two terms to get health policy right, and maybe three? Maybe the first thing we should do regarding getting that right is to get some sort of agreement here. I sense there is widespread understanding that we should have a single-tier health system which we would pay for in a different way from the way we are doing so at present. Could we do that in an open consultation process over two years? We would not necessarily introduce all the changes, but to get broad agreement on the approach would not be a bad achievement if we managed it in a cross-party way. Similarly, how will we fund education? Some of these issues are long-term and others are immediate. I do not think we can leave our third level education system hanging for two years while we work out the funding of it, because it is in a funding crisis. If one speaks to anyone in the colleges, one will hear it and we all know it. Our colleges need funding now, so how do we do that, as a long-term project and as a short-term action?

I just want to set out some wider approaches in the time I have. I mentioned the idea of wider partnership already. Second, there is some discussion in the document about how the public service itself is monitored. We should not get hung up on a big regulatory system where it is a tick-box exercise and where every public service is laden down with meeting targets and producing outputs, where it is all part of such a rigid structure that they do not actually get their job done, they cannot innovate, they cannot be responsible and they cannot have a sense of pride. We should look to bring the public service in to liberate it in this State of ours of which we are all proud and to change working arrangements.

To make things really work, we need to get citizens involved, as I mentioned earlier. One aspect of this document that I liked is that sense of actually going back to strength and community development, such as on page 134. We did it in the early 1990s and we lost it in the past ten years. We went from a community-centred, empowered system to the State providing community services - the State running the services, rather than the community. I agree with the objective on page 134 to really empower community engagement and give responsibility and it is one of the things I would like to see delivered. I agree with the point made on page 159, the very last page of the report, which is short relative to what I might have written on it, that to help that happen we really need to empower local government. We have to give up power from this House and we have to decentralise power. If we are to get that sense of citizen engagement and good planning, we must give responsibility back to our people. We can do that through directly elected mayors, as is hinted here, and through new tiers of governance below the county council level, making the public participation networks, PPNs, really work. That could be helped by having some system of voluntary, non-paid borough, district, rural and urban councils. That would be a good output, which I am sure we will get agreement on. We would have some expertise on how to do it. We have all been involved in that sort of community sector.

There are two other projects I have a particular interest in helping to deliver. There are also many others and my colleague, Deputy Catherine Martin, will be able to add to the list if she kicks in, but I will discuss two now. One is set out on page 50 of the document, the idea of adopting a community or public banking system along the lines of the Sparkasse model in Germany. That would be an example of taking something that is working elsewhere and developing it here. The real attraction of the Sparkasse model is that it keeps money in the community. It is about regionally structured banking - really professional banking - that supports local business in that the deposits raised in the region go back to the region. It brings responsibility as well as economic growth for those areas, and that is a strength of this system. I would love to see the Sparkasse model implemented here. I know Irish Rural Link advocates it and it is cited in the document here as being quickly deliverable. We can test things. We do not have to do it all. We should be more flexible in terms of trying things. If they do not work, we can step back. We should be more innovative and flexible in how we work.

Similarly, I like the proposal on page 24 of the document to go with the cost rental model of social housing. I believe the State has to step up. Going back to my very first point in response to Deputy Broughan, I am from the left. I believe in the State and I believe in the State providing social services. I believe we should be developing social housing. I do not think it should be privatised. A cost rental model might do it, using both local authorities and housing associations.

I will finish with words the Taoiseach said. What he said echoed what I have heard my colleague, Deputy Catherine Martin, say, which is that we should move away from thinking just of economic statistics to thinking of the lived experience of our people. In particular, as I heard him say, we should consider the mental health of our young people and how we strengthen that.

That is about more than numbers and growth. As I said this morning it is about values, a sense of culture, how we raise families and not just doing everything for economic interests alone. It is about not just seeing ourselves as the big competitor with everyone working frantically all the time with prices going up to pay for everyone working all the time and that kind of circle. A country based on certain more qualitative values and the measurements of those values may be something we should look to trying to achieve. I take the Taoiseach's point about how we should change, but maybe we should change our measures of success and start measuring quality of life improvements as the key target we should be looking to improve. The use of economic growth indicators is one of the reasons why people have lost faith in the current economic orthodox system. Let us change the rules, change the measures and let us change the way politics works: that is from the Left. I thank the Taoiseach.

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