Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The Government's proposal to sell off 25% of AIB is pure folly at this time. Ireland will sell off 25% of a bank that has cost the taxpayer tens of billions of euro for something in the region of €3 billion and we will not be able to give the people any dividend from the cash raised from the sale. For a long time I have been making the case for changes to the Stability and Growth Pact in order to allow for greater investment in public infrastructure. Unfortunately, the Government has so far utterly failed to push this idea at a European level. The result is that none of the proceeds from any sale of AIB could be invested in building houses, hospitals or schools. I ask the House to bear in mind that AIB is the bank that has been rescued three times by the people of Ireland. The original policy of selling off our holding in AIB was based on a need to reduce the national debt. However, that position has changed dramatically: Ireland's net debt has fallen and will continue to fall as the economy performs well and expands. To use Keynes's phrase, when the economy expands, debt melts like snow off the ditch. That is true, but the Government cannot recognise it.

Diverting everything we would get from selling one quarter of AIB would only reduce the national debt by 1% to 1.5% of GDP. Everyone recognises that Ireland is in dire need of additional spending on houses, hospitals and schools and particularly on such things as public transport and broadband. The social case for greater investment in housing and hospitals is clear. The economic case for investment in transport and communications infrastructure is equally clear, particularly with Brexit on the horizon. The Minister for Finance, Deputy Michael Noonan, is foolishly proposing to press ahead with the sale of 25% of our shares in AIB. However, he tells us that not one cent of the proceeds can be invested in improving infrastructure. The financial advisers working on the sale stand to earn €40 million from this action; the people will see no such benefit. Public investment has the potential to yield great long-term benefits to Ireland and give citizens some concrete advantage from the vast sums spent on the bank bailouts. The social good it could yield, if invested in public infrastructure, would be much greater.

I will give two small examples in the Dublin area. In the area I represent, Barnwell and Hansfield, a special development zone is ready to provide an additional 3,000 houses on a serviced site at Clonee on the Dublin-Meath border. The hold-up is due to the fact that a road needs to be built to access the area to build the houses. However, when the Government recently made an announcement on infrastructural investment to allow houses to be built, the fund was not big enough to provide for the project. Another vital infrastructural project is the electrification to DART standards of the Maynooth railway line. The Government is now stalling on the project, despite detailed plans having been available for many years. If the electrification project were carried out, people would be able to buy houses in areas from which, as happens in London and other great metropolitan cities, they could commute quickly into the city centre.

The Government is spreading the finance for infrastructural development too thinly. Pushing for changes to EU rules in the financing of essential infrastructure would provide for much-needed projects such as these. We can see the adverse effects of German-inspired EU fiscal rules not only in Ireland but also in France and Italy. Germany , by its own acknowledgement, is not investing in essential infrastructure to the long-term detriment of its economic health.

This absence of public investment is due to the ideological stranglehold on the European People's Party, which meets in Ireland this week, by German ordo-liberal financial theocrats who prioritise debt targets over essential infrastructure investment. I reiterate that Irish people have bailed out Allied Irish Banks no less than three times. While I understand senior executives and stockbrokers want a 25% stake in AIB to be sold as soon as possible - after all, they are in business to do business - the wider national interest requires a more considered strategy.

Here we go again, with a Minister anxious to boost the feel-good factor. Harold McMillan's slogan, "You've never had it so good", seems to be the maxim of the Minister for Finance, and perhaps the proposed sale is based on the expectation of an early general election. The Minister would be well advised not to repeat the mistakes of the Government of former Taoiseach, Mr. Bertie Ahern, by electioneering and encouraging people with a spare €10,000 in savings, of whom there are not many, to invest in shares. We all remember the consequences of the Eircom flotation and how smaller investors were burned. A quick sale of the State's share in AIB would not do justice to Ireland's chronic infrastructure needs.

Deputy Boyd Barrett, who spoke a few moments ago, wants to walk Ireland out of the European Union. This would mean we would not have any capacity to invest in infrastructure. While we can trade history about different positions on the European Union at different times, there is no doubt that if we can collectively utilise the vast financial muscle of the European Union for a genuine growth and investment pact across the EU, we could see the best years. People such as Deputy Boyd Barrett and his colleagues in the Anti-Austerity Alliance who are in favour of Brexit are the allies of President Trump because they are in favour of Europe going it alone. The logic of their position is that they will be privately in favour of the privatisation of Allied Irish Banks.

We have an opportunity to make some of the essential investment of which the country is starved. Appearing before a committee today, representatives of Dublin Chamber of Commerce set out approximately 20 priority targets for the Dublin region to allow the economy to grow and shrink the national debt. This is the correct approach. Every other region can also point to opportunities, for example, completing the road network and providing skills and investment in industry and infrastructure. To throw all of that away or diminish it for a partisan sale of a partial shareholding in AIB is the greatest folly I have heard proposed for some time.

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