Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I may be sharing time with Deputy Broughan if he comes back in time. If he does not, he may share with Deputy Joan Collins. We will get there in the end. I am very glad to have the opportunity to speak on this subject because there are huge ideological issues underpinning this debate. There is a certain irony to the situation. We hear an enormous amount about, for example, the role of foreign direct investment in the economy and about all the jobs that are so dependent on it. That mantra continues on and on. The reality is, however, that the public sector and the jobs sustained by public service are actually the backbone of this economy, as they are also the backbone of every other economy. When we look at PPPs, we have to see them in that context. What this is really about, as far as I am concerned, is extending the influence of capital into the public sphere by allowing private companies like Capita or Seetec to rebrand themselves as providers of public goods. What we are talking about here is public goods which belong to the State and which should remain in the hands of the State to be managed by State structures and not be outsourced to unaccountable private companies. That is the backdrop to this issue.

The advantages which it is claimed derive from the use of PPPs include a supposed ability to use the expertise of private companies. Let us look at that claim for a moment because there is no good reason why we cannot pay for expertise if it is out there and if it is needed. It does not have to come at the cost of giving away long-term control or ownership of our infrastructure. I find it a little bit ironic to hear the representatives of Fianna Fáil and the Labour Party crying ochón about the tragedy of PPPs when they were in Governments which stood over and accelerated the use of PPPs in our society.

It is a far cry from the days when we paid for expertise. People have talked a lot about the 1950s and 1960s. Let us talk about the 1930s, when electricity was brought to Ireland. When the ESB embarked on a process of rural electrification in the 1930s it hired expertise from the German engineering company Siemens. It did not give ownership of the ESB to the Germans. It retained Irish ownership and paid for the expertise from Germany. It was such an ambitious project that editorials in newspapers at the time were saying that the scale of electrification was going to result in people being fried in their beds because so much power was going to be generated. Those who sponsored the project had vision, however. It was run by the State, owned by the State and the State kept that expertise and used it for the benefit of the public good. We would have to say that those days are long gone, not just under this Government but also under the previous ones.

The supposed reason given for using PPPs is that the private partner shares some of the risk. What a load of absolute and utter rubbish. It is just not true. Ultimately, we all know that when private concerns are involved in public infrastructure projects, such projects are too important to fail so the State invariably ends up stepping in to complete the project and pay off any debts that have been accrued along the way. The case of Carillion is a very obvious example. The real reason the Government is now looking at PPPs is that debacle. This was a huge private company that had been handed massive public contracts in the areas of health, education, construction and even school dinners. Using private companies such as this to finance public infrastructure projects off balance sheet is incredibly risky. It is not risky for the private companies; they do not face the risk. The risk is for the State because the projects may be off balance sheet but, as the briefing from the Parliamentary Budget Office emphasised, the liabilities still exist. Invariably it is the State that ends up stepping in and carrying that risk.

We have seen the knock-on effects of that in the case of Carillion and the impact on the Irish construction firm the Sammon Group, which has entered examinership as a direct result. Sammon had been subcontracted by Carillion to build six education facilities under a PPP deal with the State and now, of course, we have to have another tendering process in order to finish some of those projects.

While Sammon, as a private company, will of course attempt to rescue its business, the public projects to which it has committed are far down its list of priorities. This should not surprise us because as soon as Carillion began to struggle, its board began to change its own rules, not in order that the public could get this important public job to which we had signed up, but to protect the executive bonuses in that company. The chief executive officer, CEO, received a £1.5 million golden handshake on top of his £600,000 salary, despite the debacle the company stood over. We need to be aware of this when we commit €9.6 billion of taxpayers' money to public expenditure on PPPs. There are many PPPs, many of which are just privatisation by another name. We need to see transparency on all the categories in terms of value for money for the State, as well as efficiency in the delivery of services.

Broadband is a particular example in this regard. As we have plenty of time now, I am sure Deputy Broughan will not mind being moved to the next speaking slot, seeing as we are all on the one side and in the one camp. I will finish out this point. Broadband is incredibly important. When we talk about rural Ireland, it is ironic to think that rural Ireland actually contains huge chunks of north County Dublin within a very short radius of our national airport, yet these areas are deemed to be rural from the point of view of the provision of our national broadband services. I refer to areas such as Ballyboughal, Oldtown and so on. Let us consider the present scheme and the recent announcement that the European Investment Bank will invest €500 million in the roll-out of Irish broadband. When I sought to ask questions about this and asked the Minister the terms of this funding, a reasonable question in the context of public money being spent, the Minister refused to answer and we are still none the wiser in that regard.

A huge part of this is that these are public services and public infrastructural projects. It is an absolute fact that if one hands them over to the private sector, the private companies do not do it for the good of their health but to make money. Handing over ownership is a lunatic proposition, as far as I am concerned, but when it is done, there absolutely must be transparency in its administration, in order that the public gets that for which it paid and to which it is entitled. The same discrepancies apply throughout the system and there is a knock-on impact on the broader area of procurement and how our rules are not transparent and are ignored.

Only this week I was contacted by a firm that is on the OPW's list as a supplier in respect of the provision of services. The firm did not supply and was not chosen to install windows in the new Garda office in Wexford. It maintains it was bypassed on the list and that the types of windows and the quality of the work put in by those who got the contract to install them are not up to spec, not up to standard and it is not being administered properly. The firm contends that the use of the type of glass that is being used in detention areas there poses a very high risk of breakage due to the low strength of the glass. The firm cannot get answers even though it is on the procurement panel. This might be a small example but it is an important one to this Irish firm, which is on the list. There is a knock-on effect as well. We see it in so many areas. We had a company that excelled in the provision of educational books fold because the contract was set up at a level at which no Irish firm could compete and the English market came over and took up our supply of educational books. Procurement and the delivery of public goods are public services for the Irish people. They should be held, as far as I am concerned, in State ownership and by the public, whereby we employ expertise for cost but do not hand over ownership. Carillion and other examples have shown what an absolute disaster that can be.

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