Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank all the Deputies who contributed and particularly the Deputies who supported this legislation, including Deputies Cassells, Broughan, O'Reilly and Ryan. Very instructive things were said. I am very disappointed in the Minister of State's response. I say this as somebody who was Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform for more than five years. I know that Ministers get scripts, come in here and read the scripts. The Minister of State's second intervention was more thoughtful. I believe that we need to think fundamentally differently. The notion that, somehow, it is not our role to do that is quite shocking and it is not acceptable to me. The Bill is primarily a social and economic Bill. The Minister of State's original speech was a legal and administrative rebuttal. We are the lawmakers. If there are legal impediments to things that we need to do, we change them and move them out of the way. To say that administratively they are too busy doing other things is not an argument at all. We determine the priorities of the agencies of the State.

The most serious disagreement I have had with the Minister is on the notion of independence. I have dealt very closely with the CSO because its figures determined whether we got the money drawdowns. It is completely independent. I did not always agree with some of its assessments and we had very robust discussions about them. I would preserve its independence absolutely. I refer to its statistical independence which the Bill does not suggest would be altered one whit. It certainly should not be independent to determine what it should measure. We are the policy makers; we determine what tools we need to make policy. Its job, when we tell it what should be measured, is to do it objectively and independently. It is a complete canard to talk about an intrusion on its independence. The people who crafted the speech for the Minister of State know that.

I will focus on some of the points made by Deputy Ryan. I strongly agree with him. We need to move away. It is convenient - I was that soldier - for a variety of different groups, including voluntary groups, social justice groups and survey groups to be doing all this work because it is not official. It does not have the same status of the measurement of economic growth. We do not allow ad hocgroups to measure our economic growth or our unemployment statistics. We do that ourselves because they are critical and we regard them as critical. The measurements I am suggesting now are equally critical and should not be disregarded.

I was tempted when I heard the original speech to reflect on the immortal phrase of Oscar Wilde that nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing. We know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Deputy Louise O'Reilly talked about Bhutan measuring a happiness indicator. Contentment is a result of a variety of things. It is not exclusively the result of wealth or growth. In my initial contribution I asked what growth is for if not to add to the sum of happiness or well-being of the people. It has to be for a purpose. Deputy Ryan would argue that the following of growth for itself is absolutely a destructive model. I have to mention one difference. I would not always defend Tony Blair but the notion he was a pure defender of the capitalist system is more than a tad unfair. He was a very strong advocate of regulated capitalism. Our problem in the last decade is that capitalism globalised but the regulation of capital did not. That is why I am an internationalist and believe in institutions like the European Union and OECD, to regulate capital. I believe that on issues like corporate taxation we need a global response, not an individual or regional response. We need to have a global response to the issue of mobile capital in the world.

I ask the Minister of State to think again. I am very conscious that Bills are introduced with an alacrity such that they are like trains coming, three a week, and Governments have to knock them back as best they can. The Minister of State talked about the Committee on Budgetary Oversight. At least three of us in the House were involved in the reform committee and trying to get that done was like pushing a boulder up a hill. The people pushing it the other way were my former colleagues in the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, among others. If they were not pushing it back down, they were not exactly facilitating its upward trajectory. That is a reality. There is an inertia in terms of reform in the real sense. That is why when we walked across the threshold of Government in 2011, both Fine Gael and Labour had done the analysis and established a new Department of Public Expenditure and Reform because we had to balance the books. I listened to people describe that Government as an austerity Government. When income falls by a third and one is trying to maintain expenditure at a level a third greater than income, any household will say there is a problem. Our discernment was we needed not only to balance the books so we could afford to maintain the infrastructure of the State but that we also needed reform. A very significant process of reform was undertaken, not all of it visible. My real concern now is that the reform focus has diminished and will disappear entirely. Maybe even the Department will disappear entirely as we get back to normal activity as if reform was not required on a permanent basis. I urge the Minister very strongly to think again.

Something like over 200 Bills have passed Second Stage. In this state of limbo that is new politics, it is becoming a joke. It is a very serious joke for the 200 Bills, many of which are worth enacting, although some are not. They all deserve to be processed through to the end. There is a notion we should let everything pass. Fianna Fáil, Sinn Féin, the Green Party and the Labour Party will support the Bill and it will pass Second Stage, whatever the Minister of State's view is but that is not good enough. It is an important issue which we need to embrace and I hope the Minister of State will so we can at least have a debate on these issues and not say it has been done by the oversight committee or IFAC or somebody else. Let us as a House determine we want a different set of indicators and see how we can progress it. I will happily give my energies to the committee system to try to advance it. I ask the Minister of State to give it further consideration and hopefully goodwill when it comes to be voted upon next week.

I will address a remark to the Ceann Comhairle. I have genuine concerns that when we pass legislation here on Second Stage, it has to mean something. When we pass resolutions, as we did earlier today, the Government might not like the instruction of the House, for example the instruction to abolish the strategic communications unit. If the formal resolution of the House has as much meaning and impact as a show of hands at a debating society in one of our colleges, we are in a very dangerous place because it was never the case until this Dáil. If the core and essence of new politics is to take power back to this assembly and rebalance the power of the Executive, it will be meaningless, very destructive and undermining of this place if the Executive can simply say it will ignore it all. They are really important issues we have to address. I say it in the full understanding of the pressure on the Executive. I say this as a small party in Opposition: it might be the case that we have too many Bills coming through. We might need to have a better filtration system and we are considering that.

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