Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I ask the Minister for Finance to imagine for a second that he is part of a normal Irish family with a house that has a massive mortgage on it. Let us suppose that the house in question also has a hole in its roof. That family can choose what to do with the income coming in. Logically, the first thing a normal Irish family would do is fix the hole in the roof. Having sorted out the infrastructural elements of the house, the family might then seek to pay down some of the mortgage on the house to ensure that it is not overly exposed to any bad times it might go through over the coming years. When the family gets its mortgage into a sustainable state, it might then look at putting money into a rainy day fund. That would be the sensible thing for most families to do.

I say all of this as a way of explaining the position in which the country finds itself. There are massive infrastructural problems in this State. Those who want to travel between Cork and Limerick have to use a 1950s road to get between the two cities. It takes people in County Meath two hours to get into the city of Dublin each day. Many people get stuck on the M50 as they try to get about the place. There is no doubt that the infrastructure provided by the State is holding people back as they seek to live their lives and do their business. The hole in our infrastructure needs to be filled. The logical thing for the country to do would be to invest its money in that direction. For some unknown reason, the country has decided to start to save for a rainy day fund at a time when, metaphorically, the rain is coming through a hole in the roof.

People cannot understand why there can be no access to broadband in country areas while, at the same time, we are trying to save money for down the road.

It is natural to have a hierarchy or priorities at any moment in time and capital infrastructure is one of the productive investments a State can make. With tax breaks the money is lost, as is the case with a wage rise in the public service. The money goes into the economy but only comes back, and not massively so, by being spent. If a State invests in capital infrastructure, the chances are that in the long run it will get the money back in multiples of the amount it initially spends. In the past seven years, however, when this Government was faced with the choice of investing in public services, capital investment or giving tax breaks to those on upper incomes it has, for some reason, always gone for the last option. This has caused massive difficulties and only in Romania are capital investment levels lower. If we maintain our current capital investment level the Romanian economy will be the only one worse than ours after a period.

There is no magic formula for competitiveness with regard to businesses. They simply need to be able to communicate with customers and transport things to them, while having competitive inputs into the formulation of a product or service. How can they do that when most of the geographical space on the island of Ireland is without broadband and will not have decent broadband potentially until 2024? Fianna Fáil promised broadband for everybody in the country back in 2006 and now Fine Gael has pushed it out to 2024. The Department of Transport has stated that it needs €3 billion just to make secondary roads in the State safe, which shows the level of our infrastructural famine. In respect of energy development, we are going to have to pay €600 million in 2020 because this Government will not meet its climate change objectives. In Britain they are producing more solar power this summer than nuclear and coal combined but this country does not even have a solar industry at the moment. We do not even have a feed-in tariff for the solar industry and this is what a lack of capital investment produces.

I want this Government to be fiscally and socially responsible but we have the second highest debt per capita, lower only than Japan's. As sure as night follows day there will be a recession, a downturn in the next ten years. Whether this Government does everything right or not, there is an economic cycle that we cannot avoid.

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