John McGuinness (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am not quite sure where the confidence and supply agreement begins and ends regarding a budget. I am no great fan of the arrangement, like many others around the country. If ever one needed evidence of lack of delivery on the part of a government, one need only look at this budget. One will hear the normal clichés trotted out - "missed opportunity" and so on - but it is clear evidence that the Government does not understand that its first obligation is to keep its people safe. It is a clear indication to me that no imagination was shown and no vision displayed in the budget. It is simply a budget that has been cobbled together to keep this show on the road. That is the reality of this budget. As a result, the big winners continue to be big winners.

For example, I have seen in the newspapers over the past few days - perhaps it was just today - that the State has paid €221 million in legal fees. Let us examine that in the context of the budget. This morning the Central Bank is before the Joint Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach, where the members are trying to hold the bank to account regarding the tracker mortgage issue. That bank spent €7.5 million in legal fees in one year. How much of that was caused by the fact that the banks generally continue to drag their feet on their responsibilities, refuse to accept there is a tracker mortgage issue and refuse to deal with the full cohort of people and customers affected by the issue and, as a result, cause the bank to have to buy in expertise and legal fees? That is the impact that private sector activity has on the budget for this country. It forces an agency of the State to spend greater amounts of taxpayers' money on legal and professional fees. That is what is going on. It is a never-ending cycle, and the Committee of Public Accounts every week discovers all the inefficiencies and poor spending for the State. The committee reports it to the line Minister, who in turn reports it to the Minister of State responsible, and one gets the normal report back, which generally gives a blasé explanation as to why it had to be done.

Were this a business, it would probably be closed down because it is inefficient, ineffective and losing money hand over fist to the private sector, which is draining the State of valuable resources.

One need only consider the spend thereafter on, for example, education. The universities are demanding more money and we are demanding that there be universities in, for example, Waterford in the south east. I do not disagree with any of that, but I do disagree with the amount of money that universities are spending to achieve it, to keep their people safe and to look after their employees. There is evidence of significant waste in that sector, with money being spent on paintings or €13,000 being spent on retirement parties for individuals, while those in the sector who have made complaints under whistleblowing legislation have not been paid for three or four years. Someone needs to hold those colleges to account. In particular, someone needs to tell CIT that, as required by legislation, it needs to pay members of its staff when they are on leave because they blew the whistle on some scandal or other.

The same applies to the Garda and the Prison Service. The latter is in crisis. Numerous prison officers are out sick because of incidents in which they were badly injured by prisoners while at work. They have been put on suspended leave and are not being paid fully. They must fight for their wages. That is a scandal in itself, but when one considers the amount of taxpayers' money that is being used to prop up a system that does not work and has poor HR management systems in every sector, is it any wonder that there are problems with staff?

I challenge the Minister of State to put in place a more responsive dedicated unit rather than the €5 million on spin within the Taoiseach's office, attach that spend to the Committee of Public Accounts and take real action on reports that are being made available to various Ministers with a view towards change and reform. They are reluctantly considering, and desperately avoiding, reform because it may bring about greater efficiencies in how taxpayers' money is spent.

I wish to address the major issues in the budget. I acknowledge the work that the Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, is doing on housing, but I am afraid that he is experiencing the reluctance of local authorities to build. How is it that large housing schemes were constructed throughout the country in the 1950s and 1960s when there was little expertise or money but there was a drastic need for public housing? Local authorities did that work well. They now have the expertise and vast amounts of money, yet for some reason they are unable to deliver. They do not build houses. They no longer collect rubbish. They no longer have anything to do with water. What in the name of God are county managers actually doing? For what are they getting paid? The Minister needs to call them in again and tell them to build or buy the houses that are necessary if the waiting lists that exist in every county are to be reduced. There are 3,500 people on the list in Kilkenny, a number of sites that are ready to be built on and developers who are ready to construct, yet there is no appetite within the local authority to do it.

I challenge the Minister to make available a scheme, such as the shared ownership or grant scheme, to ensure that that the block of people in the middle, who do not qualify for local authority housing because they are over the money threshold even though they do not have enough to qualify for a loan, are included on some list. A scheme should be made available to such people so that they might buy or construct a house for their family. I want local authorities to build extensions to keep people in their homes. There is almost a refusal by local authorities to do that kind of work.

I want local authorities to buy houses for the families of children with special needs. For several years, I have raised in the Chamber a case that I have been dealing with in Kilkenny. The Respond! Housing Association has three units that could each house a family. It has planning permission. However, for ten years or more that site has remained idle. A house was constructed that could house a family with special needs but it has been vacant for at least ten years. I have brought this matter to the attention of the Minister and Respond! but nothing has happened because the connection between the Minister, Respond! and the local authority is gone. They no longer respect public representatives. In fact, we are a nuisance. I challenge Deputies to pick up the phone right now and telephone their county managers, then tell me whether they get through. County managers pay lipservice to the legislation when meeting Oireachtas Members. Were the Minister to exercise his authority where it was necessary to make them do their job, we would have houses on the ground. There is no need for a further agency, just as there is no need for an agency to make cheap money available to developers. We own AIB and have a share in another bank. Why can the Government not tell them to loan a particular amount of money in a particular scheme?

We are too fond of creating quangos in this country and outsourcing problems to other agencies. That is rife within the HSE, which is essentially dysfunctional. It does not know how many managers it has. It knows that it has too many, that there are more managers than front-line staff and that more respect is given to managers than to front-line staff, yet the latter are the Band-Aid holding all of the HSE's services together. Without them, their dedication and their passion, the health service would be in a worse situation.

How capable is the management of the HSE in respect of its services and the money that the Government gives it? The HSE still does not have a single accounting system. Rather, there are a number of systems across the country that do not speak with one another. As a result, the HSE does not know what is happening in the health service at any given time. What we do know is that, in each year over the past few years, the HSE has almost tipped €1 billion in overspending. It has received an increase in this year's budget, but that will only offset what it overspent last year. The HSE is constantly running ahead of its spend and is marching just to stand still. It is crazy that the HSE does not have someone who will take responsibility. I have no confidence in its management. I have the greatest of confidence in its staff because, once someone is in their care, he or she progresses well. However, the waiting list to get into their care incurs a major human cost.

I urge reform of and greater accountability in the HSE, with a management structure to equal any business on the front line of best practice in this country. That is necessary. Change managers are needed to ensure that the reforms required to bring about a better health service are enacted.

Politicians act in good faith, now as they did in the past, and try to do their best, but they are challenged by a system that beats them down over the short period a Minister holds office.

It is the same with An Garda Síochána. We had a crisis in the Garda that went on for months on end and resulted in the departure of two Commissioners and a Minister, yet I have not heard the House debate the new plan and strategy for the force. I have not heard any discussion of it. I challenge the Government to bring its plan to the floor of the House. A strategy is needed because no single person can manage a force with 12,000 to 14,000 members and be the Accounting Officer before Dáil committees week in and week out as well as appearing before the other organisation overseeing the Garda. With respect to those within the force, it needs a new, modern and dynamic system of management. There is a need for education for those who want to join the force such as there is for doctors or nurses. Why do we not have courses like that for the Garda? Why is there no officer corps within An Garda Síochána as there is in the Army? Why do we not break down the force according to its responsibilities as is done in France and then make them accountable for the money they spend? They do not have a single system of accounting within their force.

If I stand up to criticise the Garda, the health service or a local authority, I want to be able to do so with the intention of trying to improve their lot. I want to see a better force. Politicians, however, do not ensure that a better management system and a better force is provided for. That is where we fall down. When Mary Harney was Minister, I called for a truce around health whereby we would all buy into the same policy and try to support the Department's patient-centred initiatives. We had it recently in the health committee, but when it brought forward its strategy, the money was not put behind it. Nothing happened.

The one issue in health which we have to grasp is mental health. We talk about it in the House and say there are millions available, but what happens on the ground thereafter is shocking. Young people with mental health issues who turn up for care do not get it. I know of numerous cases where people turned up for care, were refused or received the wrong care or ended up in a community setting and subsequently took their own lives. That is a fact and we have to do something to address it. If we do not have the fully qualified people at the front line, we must do something about it. Our young people are being destroyed by the challenges of life for which they are unprepared, for some reason or other, and we have to reach out to them. The services are not there, however. The same thing happens as older people go through life and come to need support and services.

The single complaint that emerges loud and clear from life in modern Ireland is the fact that the banks have driven so many people to their deaths. Many people have committed suicide because the banks have spent every single day tormenting families to collect money. One vulture fund recently told a client that it did not care where he got the money. He was told to ask friends, neighbours, family, his mother, his father or the credit union as long as he got the money. "We want money" is the attitude of a manager in a vulture fund. As long as we allow that to happen without regulation, the quality of people's lives will be tested day in and day out. The Central Bank will acknowledge this morning that its does not have the powers to deal with the tracker mortgage issue. It does not have the extended powers necessary to tell banks to pay the cohort of people who have been proven to have been put on the wrong rate and proven to have been taken off the tracker. The Central Bank does not have the power and so it tries to cajole the banks or put moral pressure on them. No bank, to my knowledge, understands moral pressure. Banks understand their bottom line and the need to protect it and they ignore what we say in the House.

While I welcome the statement of the Taoiseach yesterday and the fact that the banks are being brought in to explain their stance, he and the Minister for Finance should beat up on the lot of them. They should threaten to withdraw their licences or to restrict them. There are other players in the market. Sparkassenbanks in Germany want their model to be permitted in this country. Today in Germany, ten year tracker rates stand at 1.1% but one cannot get that here. The banks are running roughshod over every well-intentioned politician and regulator because they can. We should ensure by way of legislation and penalties of one kind or another that the day comes when the banks cannot do that. The day must come after which headlines asking why no one will stand up to our bullying banks never again appear in our newspapers. The banks should not be allowed to bully families or individuals. Addressing that is the responsibility of Government and it is what I mean when I say any Government is obliged to keep its people safe. We have not done that.

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