Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am glad to have an opportunity to speak to the Finance Bill. I had only two and half minutes to speak about the budget. This is a welcome change.

The Finance Bill is the statutory mechanism used to give effect to the measures announced in the budget. It is timely to reflect in a more positive way on from where we have come and how much we have developed in recent years, in addition to the great sacrifices that had to be made by the people and politicians to get where we are. There are many things that we still have not achieved; about which there is no doubt. We have a serious housing problem which affects young people and with which we have to deal sooner rather than later. I would certainly like something to be done in this area as a matter of urgency.

As much as anybody else, I am fully aware of the exigencies. I was a member of the special housing committee that met two years ago to examine how we should deal with the housing crisis in the country generally. I suggested, as I have done many times, the way to deal with the issue was to go back to the old-fashioned system of relying on local authority and affordable houses. That system was changed about 25 years ago when approved housing bodies were given the responsibility to take over from the local authorities and replace them. For my sins, I predicted at the time that this would not work, but everybody scoffed and said it was the greatest idea ever and that it was bound to solve the problem. It was said it would bring private money to the public house-building programme, without any major sacrifice. That was wrong; it did not happen in that way. All that happened was that the particular housing requirement was not met and it has not been met since. It will not be met as long as these bodies are competing. Let me outline my reason for thinking this, without meaning any disrespect to the housing bodies. In fact, the special housing bodies are very good and proved that they were very good at dealing with specific and very acute problems. They should never have been expected to deal with the thrust, body and weight of the housing requirement. Along the way some wise person decided to change the terms "local authority houses" and "affordable houses" and to use instead the term "social housing", as if identifying such housing was free in some way or other. That did a lot of damage to the efforts being made to deal with the housing crisis.

We must remember that housing provision poses an ongoing problem; it does not go away. Every year a new crop of people require housing to be provided in one form or another. Those in the lower income group are competing with those in the middle income group. They are coming downhill at the former and competing with them at the bottom of the ladder. It is a very unfair game. Neither the middle income group nor the lower income group is being satisfied and they cannot be because house prices are being controlled by one sector.

The housing crisis is being controlled by the same sector. It will never change unless there are specific changes to the structure of the housing development process and responsibility is returned to the local authorities. They must in turn be given a programme each year with targets they must meet and provide. That is easily done because all the budgetary and census figures are available. They are available in respect of the need to provide school places, public utilities and services. Housing is nothing exceptional in that regard. It is just another issue that must be dealt with.

The other issue in this regard relates to taxation in general. Local authority housing applicants who find themselves forced up the ladder to compete with others in the private housing sector in some cases end up spending up to €2,000 per month. That is a lethal situation. The affordable and local authority housing system was part of our taxation system when it was working properly. That meant the people in a particular income bracket were not forced to seek higher wages, because that is the only other way they could go. That happened in the case of benchmarking some years ago. Benchmarking was introduced to address the fact that it was not possible for people to live due to the cost of living arising from massively increasing house prices. Benchmarking was introduced in the public sector but it impacted on the private sector in turn and inflated the economy to the extent that we know what happened eventually. It should not have happened but that is the way it was.

It is no harm to reflect on the way we used to do things and on the way we appear to have got into a rut and are unable to look at the positive things that were there. It is easy for the Opposition to pour cold water on everything the Government does. It does it very well, and I am sure I did it too when I was in a similar situation. However, I have learned new ways to do it from listening to the Opposition over the last couple of years. It was always a feature of this House that there was a recognition by whoever was in opposition of the efforts of those in government in difficult times. They always gave credit for that. That has disappeared now. In fact, the only thing that happens now is that whoever is in government is blamed for everything that goes wrong and the Opposition takes credit for everything that does not go wrong - I did not say goes right, but what does not go wrong. We must learn from that. The way we debate in the House has changed, and not for the better. We should never say anything in the House that we could not say to people outside the House. That is part and parcel of what we must do if we are to establish respect for each other in the House. In return, people outside the House will have respect for the Members of the House and for each other. We were quite good at that over the years even in turbulent times but we have lost our way in that regard in more recent times.

I wish to refer briefly to the current position and the challenges that lie ahead. The Finance Bill must be viewed against international global challenges and the potential for world trade wars. When Peter Sutherland was alive he was a major player in achieving equilibrium in world trade and the WTO. He spent a great deal of time working on it and was very successful. His influence was positive and we reached a situation where small countries were no longer the minions and targeted all the time. Of course, some of the larger economies do not like that. They would prefer to have minions in their vicinity, like great white sharks and others. It is always good to have minions in their vicinity so they can rely on them for support on particular occasions. At present, there is a distinct threat of a global trade war and we must keep that in mind particularly when dealing with the budget and Finance Bill. We must recognise that the threat is ahead of us and hope that it does not get worse.

There is also the issue of any diminution of foreign direct investment here. Some Members of the House would welcome that. They will say that there should not be any foreign direct investment and that it should be elsewhere. Of course, elsewhere will always welcome that because elsewhere wants to attract foreign direct investment. It is our competitor. When we are in that situation we must recognise that not everybody is on our side.

The obvious threat of Brexit has not gone away. Its effects will not go away unless there is a change of heart in our neighbour across the water. We would all hope that there would be and that it would revert back to what prevailed heretofore, acknowledging the sacrosanctity of the Good Friday Agreement and the necessity to underwrite it and stay with it. All of us should recognise the benefits of the Single Market of more than 500 million people. It is a sizeable market in anybody's back garden, without going to the wider global sphere. Starting with a market of 500 million people is a fair advantage. We must ensure that we do not have a situation where our next door neighbour withdraws from the scene and we end up paying for it. That could happen, and we must guard against it. We will do that by being certain we retain sufficient ownership of our economy at all times so we can battle as well as anybody else in the troubled waters that might lie ahead. I have great confidence in our ability as a nation to survive in that situation.

In addition, we have a duty to look after our neighbours in Northern Ireland. We are inextricably linked economically and socially despite all the things that have happened. As the Queen said in her speech, we might be better off if some of them had not happened. Now, however, we must ensure that we do nothing disruptive. We will not do that in this jurisdiction but we must hope that in adjoining jurisdictions we do not find ourselves in a less providential situation than we had heretofore. This island must be able to trade in a Single Market, North and South, for the benefit of both the North and the South. Together we can play our part. A united Ireland aside, this is simple economics and we have a major role to play in the European Union as well.

In recent years we endured probably the most rigorous test we have ever faced, when we found ourselves broken. I am not attributing a political agenda to this because these things can happen at any time. We must try to ensure they do not happen again or that we have done our best to avert the worst excesses of what might happen. Items such as the Rainy Day Fund, while not massive, are an indication of what we have in mind at budget time and in the Finance Bill. It is a wise decision because, if need be, we will be in a position to borrow on the international markets at low interest rates. If we do things wrong and throw caution to the wind by spending injudiciously, we will not have that backing. Not even our European colleagues would be secure with that. It is important to ensure that our European colleagues have sufficient confidence in us as a nation to withstand anything that happens, and they will as long as we are prudent in how we manage our finances. We should also remember that notwithstanding the fact the IMF has withdrawn from Government Buildings, a problem still remains. We must remain alert and try to ensure that when that time comes we will recover again if we have to, we will depend on ourselves to do it and we will accept the support of our colleagues in Europe in that effort.

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