John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will do my best. I am always fascinated listening to my colleague, Deputy Brendan Smith, because we represent such contrasting constituencies and his depth of knowledge is always very impressive.

I thank the Minister of State for his patience in sitting through and listening to the budgetary contributions. We all have a lot to say. I have been privileged for the past year and a half to be a member of the new Committee on Budgetary Oversight. It has proven itself to be a very independent committee of the House. The publications and the opinions of the independent director of the Parliamentary Budget Office are making a significant contribution to the budgetary debate in Parliament and beyond. As a person who admits to not having a grasp of complex economics but an interest in it, no more or less than any politician in this House, I have found the contributions, research papers and the speakers and witnesses from the office who have come before the committee to be invaluable in reducing one of the complexities of budget preparations.

In the post-budget analysis, the independent budgetary director, who was appointed by this House and is independent of the Department of Finance and the Minister, has stated that the 2019 budget can be considered a pro-cyclical budget. Consider all we have come through since 2008, all the warnings, and all the lessons that the Government was meant to have learned. The Government talks about never returning to and not wanting to repeat the mistakes of the past and learning the lessons of the past, but the independent Parliamentary Budget Office says that this budget is pro-cyclical, it is fanning the flames of growth. That is something that we must watch.

I will refer to one of the budgetary oversight committee's recommendations. The Minister of State's party colleague and my constituency colleague, Deputy Brophy, who is the Chair of the committee, published a report recently on gender equality budgeting. It is a fine document that made some significant recommendations that arose out of a lot of international work.

They suggested a significant cultural change around gender budgeting was required. The international evidence suggests that civil servants and politicians need to recognise that the budget is not a gender-neutral exercise. We can still see evidence of older thinking in some Departments today. For example, many of the chapters in the 2018 tax strategy papers contain a single-line statement regarding the gender and equality implication of various tax measures. Most of these statements read simply, "there are no specific gender or equality implications with regard to measure A, B or C". In one analysis, it transpired that one budgetary measure introduced by the former Minister, Deputy Burton, regarding the provision of State pensions penalised predominantly and significantly more women than men and certainly prejudiced them. One of the recommendations in that report was that the Minister for Finance would produce a gender budgeting statement, which he did not do. He has committed to do that but it is shame that he has not done it. Another recommendation, and I raised this issue when the report came before the House, was that we need to commission a study - one has been done in Scotland - on the economic role of women in society in Ireland. It is a simple task. Such a comprehensive body of work needs to be addressed. Such a study has never been done but it needs to be addressed.

We have discussed the significant overrun in the health budget. Let us be objective in analysing what it must be like to be an employee of the HSE. The Minister of State's Government came into office in 2011 and stated it would abolish the HSE. The following year the then Minister, Senator Reilly, abolished the board which was made up of very talented professional men and women. The Government said it was going to fund the health service and establish universal health insurance. In 2014, the universal health insurance idea was abandoned. In 2015, a decision was taken not to abolish the HSE. The most recent decision regarding the HSE is that it needs a board. I cannot imagine what it must be like working in an organisation where a Government set out to basically disestablish it and abandon it in terms of an efficient organisation to run the health service in the country. We had five years of total uncertainty. I do not know what it must be like to work in an atmosphere like that where a chief executive is not answerable to a board, where a board cannot advise a chief executive regarding some of the critical decisions. I suspect that some of the organisational failures, or perceived failures, that have happened in the HSE in recent years are down to an absence of the oversight of a board that was in position.

In almost every parliamentary question answered regarding funding, the Minister, Deputy Harris, continuously raises the National Treatment Purchase Fund, NTPF, and that is what is now rescuing the Government. However, the Government abolished the NTPF and yet those in government speak about it now with such virtue that it is hard to believe that they saw no function for it when it came into government. That fund is bailing people out of chronically long waiting lists. One area in my constituency ran out of home care package funding for the year as early as April. We have chronic lists for such packages, for speech and language therapy and for psychological assessments, and I sure that is replicated throughout the country. The NTPF has a role to play in that respect. Those services are not particularly expensive to fund but there are serious constraints in the ability of the public sector to address those issues. There is capacity in the private sector, however, to address those issues, whether it be speech and language or psychological assessments, through perhaps the use of vouchers. Those are a number of issues with respect to which the Government has had significant failures in recent years.

Being a member of the Committee on Budgetary Oversight has been interesting in informing my view and reaction to the budget. As far as back as April, on foot of the evidence from the different witnesses who came before that committee, whether it was Mr. Seamus Coffey of the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, the ESRI, the OECD, the Governor of the Central Bank or the Minister for Finance, a number of common themes emerged that an ordinary layman could see as being key ones around which a budget was to be constructed. Those themes were mentioned quite widely in the media. They included carbon tax, in that something would have to be done in that area because of our climate change commitments. They included the equalisation of diesel and petrol, our over-reliance on corporation tax and how some measures needed to be taken to address that, the issue of the VAT rate on tourism and our susceptibility to Brexit and other international trade threats. Those are five basic themes. Objectively, the Government fudged almost every one of them.

I was particularly inspired by President Higgins's inaugural speech on Sunday. He set out quite a political manifesto for the future for any political party in this country of the issues that need to be addressed. He talked about issues such as inter-generational injustice. For someone like me who is 53 years of age, climate change will probably not profoundly impact my life at my age but it will undoubtedly impact on the younger generation and I think of my nieces and nephews in their mid-20s and mid-30s. Yet on the issue of carbon tax, the Minister for Finance failed to grasp the nettle. It is a significant area that needs to be grasped by the Government but it committed instead to developing a schedule between 2020 and 2030 regarding carbon tax, while bottling a major decision this year.

The equalisation of diesel and petrol prices is a difficult decision that must be grasped but the Minister failed to grasp it. Yet he gave a sop to cars that are run on gas, which is also a fossil fuel. We not only have an over-reliance on corporation tax but anybody who has been a local authority member for a number of years will know, as in the case of South Dublin County Council, that ten companies provide the bulk of commercial rates at local authority level. I am sure it is the same in Kildare. About ten companies are responsible for 95% of commercial rates. We are greatly reliant on those. The rainy day fund is a Fianna Fáil idea, but the Government has made a virtue of it and announces it as thought it is its own idea. We got it stitched into the confidence and supply agreement. It is an initiative driven by ourselves and we have a strong track record of devising schemes to put money away. The much maligned former Minister, Charlie McCreevy, apart from having almost cleared the national debt, set up the National Pensions Reserve Fund and but for that, the crash would have been significantly worse. Those nettles that needed to be grasped for future generations were not grasped and have been delayed for another day. That is a pity for this country both economically and in terms of policy.

Another inspiring point the President made in his inaugural speech was that what is emerging in Ireland is the first post-consumer generation, one that is turning its back on consumerism and that rejects it. Such consumerism has manifested itself in the growth in the use of plastic. We are very behind the curve as legislators in this regard, yet there is a huge appetite among the younger generation for innovative and drastic measures to be taken. They are ready to do it. They are prepared to consume less in order to play their part for the planet but as legislators, we are eons behind where they want us to be. That reflects itself in those tough decisions that must be taken regarding carbon tax and the equalisation of diesel and petrol prices.

I will refer to the subject of Dublin, an area for which I am spokesperson.

When Dublin Chamber which represents 300,000 employees and multiple companies carries out opinion surveys of employees, the top three issues tend to be housing - not homelessness because they tend to be employees who, by and large, have reasonable and attractive incomes - rental costs and transport and traffic congestion. The House leaves far too much to quangos such as the National Transport Authority to promulgate policy. Somebody has to have the balls politically to lead on this issue which has manifested itself, in particular, in BusConnects where the cart has been put before the horse. The NTA published the routes before it actually published the infrastructure which it hopes will carry these routes or spines. The publication of the reports is imminent.

One of the problems with the Luas is that everybody wants a Luas line in his or her area. Clearly, we cannot afford to do that. The next best thing is segregated bus routes, with park and ride and other proper facilities. However, no politician has led on the issue by saying Dublin city will come to a standstill unless we make dramatic decisions. No politician has said we will end up having to charge people to cross the canal cordon or ban traffic in the city centre if we do not take dramatic steps now. It has been left to a Government agency because nobody seems to have the courage to say this will be difficult and challenging. Nobody seems to be willing to guarantee, if given the time, the putting in of a transport corridor such as the Luas but on rubber wheels that would be attractive and provide seamless and untrammelled journeys, with zero obstacles. In such a corridor it would not matter if one got on a bus at 7 a.m. or 11 p.m. because the travel time would be exactly the same.

Nobody is leading on the issue because people hate change because they are afraid of it. The only way we will encourage them to leave their car behind is by doing this. We will have to tell them that we will have to break a number of eggs to make the omelette. It will be both difficult and challenging. Some people may have to lose their garden. Where I live, we used to look over a boundary wall into fields, but the M50 has been there for the past 15 years. There are disadvantages, but the main advantage is that when I leave my estate, I do not see traffic lights until I get to Dingle or Wexford town because I am right beside the motorway network. However, nobody is persuading people about the advantages of BusConnects and having transport spines. If we were offering a Luas line to communities, they would properly jump at the opportunity. BusConnects is the next best thing and could be as attractive, efficient, speedy, comfortable and reliable. However, no one - certainly not the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport - is out there selling it. There is absolutely no way we can expect people to make the changes we need in this city if someone is not leading this charge and does not have the courage of his or her convictions, instead leaving it to invisible officials. It is not their job but the job of politicians to drive change.

There are several measures which were mentioned in the budget last year which I would like to see speeded up. Traffic on the M50 is almost at a standstill. When representatives of Transport Infrastructure Ireland attended the Committee on Budgetary Oversight last year, they called for digital signage on all M50 gantries. They maintained that, if implemented, it could get another five years of capacity out of the M50. It is a slow process. There were 1,700 accidents on the M50 last year. I live beside it and know when there has been an accident because the road goes quiet and within four minutes one hears a battery of sirens as fire brigades, ambulances and Garda cars arrive. The gantry signs are important to reduce speed limits and calm traffic at peak times, thereby reducing the possibility of collisions occurring. The slightest collision on the M50 results in traffic backing up for miles and hours, with commerce and business being delayed.

I have been faithful to the time allocated to me in the absence of the digital clock. I thank the Ceann Comhairle for giving me the opportunity to make my contribution.

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