Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Now that we have regained our balance after all the spin of the weekend we are left with a document called the national development plan representing the new capital plan. I say "new" but when one actually reads through it there is a real taste of reheated dinner here. It is a plan that is meant to catch up for the last decade that was lost to austerity as Government after Government made the wrong choices, despite being told by Sinn Féin and others that this was exactly what they were doing.

Capital spending was always the low hanging fruit and unfortunately we had a Fianna Fáil Government and a Fine Gael Government that picked at it until the tree was bare. Now we have a massive housing crisis, hospital wards are overcrowded with trolleys and there is creaking infrastructure. Mar a thuilleann tú a gheobhaidh tú. Tá muidne fós ag fulaingt de bharr easpa infheistíochta agus polasaí an rualoiscthe a bhí curtha i bhfeidhm ag na páirtithe coimeádacha. Aithním go molann an plean seo tuilleadh infheistíochta a dhéanamh, ach ní théann sé fada go leor agus muidne chomh fada sin ar chúl. It is a cynical plan in promising nice things in the far future but little in the here and now. This really sums up the plan. It also represents a recommitment to the flawed, wasteful and expensive public private partnership model. It is a plan dripping with partitionism. It is not a fit plan for a modern or united Ireland. It is not even a real plan for a partitioned Ireland lagging behind on public services and infrastructure.

If there is an issue with the fiscal rules then a full campaign to achieve flexibility, especially in light of Brexit, must be waged. Sinn Féin would support the Government in doing this. There is more money on the table here for investment over the next few years. That is always to be welcomed. It is important to say that. The return on investment and the cost to be paid for underinvesting are well established.

No country can ever stand still. Roads will crack, buildings will grow too small as populations grow, water pipes will rust and bust, and hospital wards will become outdated and in some cases they will become dangerous. For far too long short-term spending and unsustainable tax cuts have poisoned political discourse in the State. There is a whole part of the picture missing in the plan with no comment on the need for engineering skills and reforms of procurement policies. This is a major gap in the plan. It is impossible to balance the spin in this plan about investment and future proofing while in the same building the Department of Finance officials plan on how to cut more and more taxes.

Is this plan good enough? Is it good enough for the next generation? Is it good enough for the children who will start school in September? Is it good enough for those people who are on waiting lists today? The answer to all of these questions is that it is far from good enough. This is a plan for standing still. It is a plan to build a State that is not far from falling part but far from excelling in public infrastructure. When we cut through the spin it is a lot of headlines covering an attempt to build a country on the cheap. The scale of investment that is needed is not reflected in this plan. This is at the core of the capital plan. Brexit is looming and Ireland is a decade behind others, as the Taoiseach likes to point out, but over the next four years only an extra 10% in capital spending is planned above what has already been announced and with only 9% more next year. This is hardly visionary. It is the bare minimum. The immediate up-front spend is lacking in the plan. The fiscal rules allow for money to be front-loaded this way but it seems a political calculation has been made that people will not notice the smog if they are looking at the clouds. The more detailed the proposals the more distant they are. Cé gur cuid riachtanach dár infrastruchtúr é an leathanbhanda, mar shampla, tá na mílte teaghlach is comhlacht fós ag fanacht air. Gheall Rialtas Fhianna Fáil go soláthrófar seirbhísí leathanbhanda deich mbliana ó shin. Cén uair a chuirfear na seirbhísí seo ar fáil? Níl am ar bith leagtha síos sa phlean. Níl gealltanas ar bith tugtha. Níl a fhios againn cén uair a bheidh leathanbhanda ar fáil. Níl aon bharúil againn faoin mhéad a chosnóidh sé faoin bplean. Níl cliú againn cé a chuirfidh ar fáil é mar níl sé sin sa phlean ach oiread.

Let us consider the promises made in health. A ward block was announced for University Hospital Limerick even though it was needed years ago. Without a doubt it is welcome but let us consider the reality. University Hospital Limerick consistently has some 40 to 50 patients on trolleys each day. Last year in University Hospital Limerick there were 8,869 patients left on trolleys. I could say the same for Donegal but that does not appear in the plan. Two of the headline announcements in the health section of the plan are the national children’s hospital and the national maternity hospital but these projects were announced years ago. A new endoscopy suite was announced for Naas General Hospital. While this proposal is welcome I hope it fares better than the surgery theatre there that has not been used once in 15 years because they do not have the staff to run it. This is despite the fact that nearly 7,000 people are on waiting lists there. I hope the proposed endoscopy suite for Naas General Hospital fares better than the maternity theatre that was built in Letterkenny General Hospital in 2000 and which has never once been used because this Government, like the previous Governments, was unwilling to put in the resources to staff the theatre. While thousands and thousands of people linger on the waiting lists consultants fight for theatre space and theatre time.

The Government wonders why people are cynical about this plan. The long-term planning is still lacking in vision once we chip away the frills. Important roads like the Letterkenny bypass are to be looked at and hopefully progressed. The high-speed Dublin-Belfast rail link is to get a feasibility study. This is a plan up to 2040. The Government was free to let its imagination run riot and to put out an ambitious plan for the future of Ireland up to 2040. However, no one in the whole Government dared to try to imagine a rail link to the north west. When we cut through the spin we have a political wish list that will fool nobody.

It is disheartening to see that after the collapse of Carillion and the overwhelming evidence now that public private partnerships, PPPs, are the wrong choice, this plan recommits to their use. We have, apparently, had a review of PPPs and we are told that everything is grand. The criticism from the IMF has been brushed away and the Government is to commit to decades more of public money being wasted on these inefficient schemes. Whatever case could be made in the bad times for PPPs as an emergency measure is long gone. After the collapse of Carillion a Member of the British House of Lords said:

PPPs enabled you, at least in the short term, to dress up considerable amounts of public expenditure and put them off the public sector balance sheet. That is not a good reason for adopting something which, in my judgment, does not give good value for money for the taxpayer, and it introduces a degree of moral hazard, which we see very much in the Carillion affair.

This was not a mad leftie. This speaker was Nigel Lawson, who was Maggie Thatcher's Chancellor. PPPs are a bad idea and including them in this plan as a key element is a costly mistake. This plan is a lie in its very name. This is not a national development plan. It is a plan for a partitioned country. It is a partitionist development plan. It speaks of the development of Ireland’s three regions while ignoring the north of our country. The plan speaks of Ireland’s main cities but does not mention Derry or the industrial city of Belfast.

It also speaks of roads to some place called the Border. Unfortunately, this does not cut it. We will deal with it further on Committee Stage.

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