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

We agree with a number of the things in the Minister's summer economic statement and his speech. We need to reduce public indebtedness to protect against future risks, to make sure that we maintain a capability for counter-cyclical economic policies and to make sure we increase investment in capital, as we agree there are infrastructure backlogs and gaps.

Where we differ is we believe we need to maintain the current tax level. If the Minister wishes to reduce certain taxes because for some reason they cause some dysfunctionality, there may be scope to increase tax elsewhere in order that there is no net reduction in tax, giving us greater spending power. We would take that different approach.

The biggest difference between us is I have no sense of the strategy behind the document. I understand the economic strategy but economics is a narrow prism by which to look at how we develop our society. I agree with the Minister that we should not merely concentrate on fiscal space. He suggested we should look at the fiscal stance instead but when I looked at what that means, he followed up by stating, in other words, we must "ensure that budgetary policy is appropriate in supporting sound macroeconomic conditions and helping our economy grow in the long run". That is not an adequate strategy. Sustainable development is development that is sustained. Growth strategy is everything. From a Green perspective the idea that it is all about economic growth is not a strategy.

This has been a problem for 30 or 40 years. Our public service has atrophied where it comes to thinking strategically. It has bought into a market ideology to such an extent that the public service has become lazy in the sense that whatever it does, it does not make strategic decisions, it is only there to set up the economic conditions to allow the market to do its job. There was an example on this here some nights ago when the Minister, Deputy Naughten, responded to our waste initiative proposal. There was a line in his statement saying that whatever else, he did not want to create another PPARS or e-voting machine. In other words, there is a public service mantra that whatever one does, one must not take a risk. One should not take a strategic risk in investment, particularly if it is digital or clean energy or new technology where one is not certain it will work. That is a mistake. In the world outside, an industrial, digital, clean energy, transport revolution is taking place. If our public service does not believe in that and has no sense of where we place ourselves in that regard, our fiscal stance will be wrong. We need to take a stance in evolving developments. Another example of this inability by the public service, and the Departments of Public Expenditure and Reform and Finance in particular, is the metro project. Yesterday, the Minister was quizzed on the analysis on that. Our State had a complete inability to do the proper economic analysis of public transport projects. They could not understand the wider developmental benefit of a proper public transport system in this city or the real cost of not having that. There is just mindless cost-benefit analysis where the Department of Finance measure things on the basis that a road project is good because point A to point B can save X amount of minutes and therefore that makes economic sense. The officials think they have done their job - no one gets fired for hiring IBM - the box is ticked and away they go. There is no thinking or strategy behind it. When one is on public transport, one can work at the same time but no one is measuring that benefit.

The environment does not matter. It is not mentioned once in the economic statement, as though it is not happening or there is no environmental context to what we must do. The Green Party stance would be to invest in electric vehicles, in the retrofitting of buildings, in greenways not motorways, in our wastewater systems in order that we are not swimming in sewage, which is happening in Dublin at present, and to invest in forestry and in housing. We need strategy. The Minister needs to take a stance on the national planning framework. We need housing and we need it close to the centres of towns and cities. The Minister needs to come out with that type of stance in the spending review's priorities.

At the very end, the Minister mentions sectoral issues but there is no mention whatever in this review of any strategic sense as to where we are going, which are the big strategic issues. How can we separate economics from a vision of society and our country, which is what is in this document? The Minister has it in his head but should put it down on paper and into his speeches and should not allow the Department to narrow us down to mere economic robots, which does not give us any vision of where we are going as a country. We need fiscal responsibility but we need more than that, we need a vision of where this country is going to go.

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