John Brady (Wicklow, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

It is incredible that the Minister can spend two entire days talking about a budget that will not happen until 2019. I refer, of course, to his announcement that there will be €1.5 billion for capital investment between 2019 and 2021. He cannot talk about the 2018 budget because both he and his predecessor overspent last year by introducing tax cuts where they were not warranted and spending millions on a housing scheme that did nothing but help fuel prices of houses. My colleague, Deputy Pearse Doherty, raised this repeatedly last year and told the Minister exactly would happen but, as always, Fine Gael went with the tax cuts and grants to developers and speculators and, to nobody’s surprise, that did not work.

In our alternative budget last year Sinn Féin made capital investment front and centre of its plans. We knew that this was the issue that needed to be tackled. Ireland is at a crossroads. We need serious capital investment yet the minority Fine Gael-Independent Alliance Government supported by Fianna Fáil is committed to cuts in taxes and the further privatisation and downgrading of essential services. The current level of public investment is simply too low to provide the housing, services and infrastructure that is desperately needed across the State. The need for public investment has been highlighted by groups and organisations as diverse as IBEC, ESRI, NERI, TASC, the European Commission, the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council and Social Justice Ireland. The Government's capital investment plan puts capital investment at only 1.9% of GNP in 2017. Given almost ten years of underinvestment and unmet demographic pressures, this shockingly low level of capital investment is reckless and unsustainable.

On paper the economy is doing very well. However, behind those figures there are issues that are unique to Ireland. We know from economists who study the performance of the economy that GDP is not a good reflection of where we are as a country. Reading the headline figures in terms of investment, one could form the view that investment in Ireland is increasing but when one gets into the detail in that regard, one discovers that the basis for this is that a small number of multinationals have relocated intellectual property activity into Ireland, which has bumped up the figures. If this activity, which has little impact on economic growth, is stripped out, investment in the country has declined. There is a major problem, in that while some multinational corporations provide much-needed employment here and some tax receipts, this skews the figures in terms of the overall GDP, which also then causes major problems when we are considering how the resources of the economy should be divvied up or, indeed, the sustainability of our debt.

One of the major challenges the country faces is the consequences of almost a decade of under funding of capital infrastructure. We have the second lowest level of capital investment in Europe and that is not acceptable or sustainable. The face of this underinvestment can be seen in our flood defences, our children being educated in prefabs, raw sewage flowing into our rivers and seas and a lack of telephone and broadband coverage. Sinn Féin is the party with a plan for economic recovery not based on fleeting corporation tax receipts or tax breaks for the wealthy but on public investment in our roads, schools, hospitals and workforce. We are committed to building a sustainable economy and an equal society.

See this speech in context