Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

This Finance Bill, like the budget that gave rise to it, lacks any kind of coherence or ambition for the country. A small amount of money was spread around very thinly, without any apparent strategic objectives being set. For that reason, it turned out to be much ado about nothing, and a missed opportunity. The small amount of money that was available - which could have been increased, had the Government chosen to do so - could have been used in a meaningful and strategic way to set long-term objectives for the country. Unfortunately, it seems that electoral objectives were more important to this Government than any kind of strategic objectives.

The Finance Bill must be seen in two different contexts. The first is the extraordinarily restrictive fiscal rules that apply and seem to have been accepted in their entirety in this country, and the second is the Government's seemingly obsessive preoccupation with tax cutting, and in particular tax cutting that favours people who are better off and earning far above the average wage, and the impact of that kind of approach on family budgets. On the fiscal rules, we know that during the austerity years capital spending was scaled back very heavily and there was little regard to the long-term impact of such an approach. We are now facing the consequences of that, with a massive overhang of underinvestment in the capital area and in our infrastructure generally. That is holding us back very substantially. There is a huge infrastructural deficit, of which the housing crisis is the most obvious example, but we also see it in the lack of investment in electricity infrastructure, rural broadband, transport and a whole range of areas. We should be investing in balanced regional development, for example.

Just this morning I had an email from a constituent of mine who had recently given up driving into work in the morning, which is the objective we have set and something we are trying to encourage people to do. This person told me that this morning in Glasnevin he was waiting at a bus stop from 7.45 a.m. until 8.15 a.m. and during that period eight buses passed by, all of them full, while the queue at his stop was lengthening all the time. That is a very clear measure of the extent to which we underinvest in public transport. While we know that we should be encouraging people to use public transport for environmental and competitiveness reasons, among others, there is still massive underinvestment in public transport. On the north side of Dublin, there is no rail option for my entire constituency. There has been no significant investment in public transport, and that is why the Swords Road and Drumcondra feature every single morning on the AA traffic reports. This is having a very real impact on people's ability to move around and to get in and out of work effectively. It is affecting competitiveness in a very substantial way in that most people in the Dublin area, and certainly the north side of Dublin, are taking anything from an hour to an hour and a half to travel perhaps five miles into the city centre to get to work.

If Ireland is to catch up, we need to invest very substantially in our infrastructure. That is not happening. We have been hugely constricted in what we can do because of the very restrictive fiscal rules. These rules are undoubtedly damaging Ireland's interests, and they should be very seriously challenged. Under the current rules, the cost of anything that Ireland allocates to infrastructure and other capital projects is calculated over a four year period, which makes no sense whatsoever. If we are talking about significant investment in rail projects, for example, those projects will be of benefit and be in use for 50 to 60 years, so why are we calculating the investment costs of those projects over a four year timescale? Housing is a similar area where there is a massive underspend. We expect houses will last us 60 to 100 years, yet the costs of the investment in them are spread over a mere four years. That makes no sense either.

The amount set aside under the revised capital plan, despite recent improvements, is wholly inadequate by any kind of standard. It is fundamentally unambitious for the country. Investment as a percentage of GDP will remain very low under this plan, and the amount we spent in 2017, for example, is very similar to the amounts we spent during the austerity years when we could not afford to borrow and we were almost entirely dependent on IMF and EU funds to keep us afloat. We are not investing very much more than we did during those very difficult years.

We in the Social Democrats firmly believe that the plan is extremely unambitious and lacks any kind of long-term thinking in terms of the needs of the country. It makes sense to invest heavily now in order to save in the long term. That is what the approach of Government should be. We should be investing in things like an extensive retrofitting programme, rather than the tokenistic stuff that is being done at the moment. If we do that, we will undoubtedly save in the future. We are facing fines of some €600 million per year from the early 2020s because of our failure to meet our targets in that regard. We need to take a long-term strategic view of investing now so that we will save money in the future. Unfortunately that has not been the approach taken by Government.

The partial sale of AIB is a perfect example of how the fiscal rules work against Ireland's interests. The proceeds of that sale could not be used to invest in infrastructure when that would have been the sensible and prudent thing to do. Meanwhile, we borrow funds at historically low interest rates, and in some cases we enjoy negative yields from some investors, yet we are not allowed to capitalise on the opportunity which that situation presents to us. We can get money for next to nothing, and we are precluded from availing of that possibility. We should be borrowing now, when money is so cheap, but fiscal rules are preventing us from doing that. The kind of approach that this forced us to take works against the interests of the country and against any kind of common sense. That is why we say that the Government should be challenging those rules in a robust way. There is no indication that has happened. During the economic collapse in 2008 and in subsequent years, the Government did not challenge the EU on the conditions of the bailout. Everybody is paying an enormous price for that, and we have been burdened with huge public debt as a result of the Government's failure to stand up to the EU. This is happening again now, in relation to the fiscal rules. The Government is taking a cowering approach to this issue, which does not serve the country's interests. The Government needs to stand up for the people, challenge those rules and make the case in Brussels that the EU is forcing us into a situation which is holding back the country very significantly. It makes no sense whatsoever.

At the very minimum, we in the Social Democrats believe the Government should have done what IBEC was proposing to do, which was to use the official GDP figures for the purposes of calculating the fiscal space.

Unfortunately, that has not been done. The Government, for some unknown reason, has decided to use the imputed figures rather than the official GDP figures. If we did as IBEC proposed, it would have allowed an additional €400 million in fiscal space. That should have been availed of and used for infrastructural investment. Overall-----

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