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

My colleagues have raised some themes that I will be referring to myself. I wanted to raise four points. One arises from my role on the Committee on Budgetary Oversight and some of the common themes that have come forward there. The second point arises from my role as spokesperson for Dublin and Dublin transport and relates to some of the aspects of the budget that are especially disappointing, including climate action. The third relates to my constituency and some of the measures that are going to impact specifically, or not, on my constituency.

In his contribution to this debate yesterday, the Taoiseach stated:

There are many examples in our own history, including recent history, of warnings going unheeded that a period of economic growth would be followed by a period of economic collapse. Steps were not taken to prepare for what was coming and the country was left defenceless when the worst happened.

These are sentiments I strongly share. As a member of the Committee on Budgetary Oversight, I have heard this theme being raised repeatedly at meetings of the committee where we have benefited from the contributions and attendance of witnesses such as the Governor of the Central Bank. We have had informal meetings with the IMF and regular briefings with the ESRI. We have also had regular briefings with the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, IFAC, the body set up under the previous Government to institutionalise the memory of the crash, as the former chairman put it. For the past three years, and especially for the past two years, as the contributors and witnesses came before the committee several common themes have emerged. One has kept coming up for the past three years. This is our over-reliance on corporation tax. This is a point to which my colleague, Deputy Curran, alluded. Corporation tax is Ireland's version of what North Sea oil is to Norway. Deputy Michael McGrath, our finance spokesperson, said the other day that one of the lessons we learned from the crash was that it is important and prudent to put some money away when times are good. Modest growth began in this country statistically and factually in 2010. We have had nine years of growth. Under the confidence and supply agreement signed between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, the rainy day fund, a Fianna Fáil idea, was instituted. That was 2016. The rainy day fund, as Deputy Michael McGrath said, is there but there is not a penny in it. In fact, a real sign of how badly the public finances have been managed in good times is the fact that every cent that may have to be spent in the event of a no-deal Brexit scenario will have to be borrowed. I will put it in stark illustration. When Deputy Noonan sat in the Minister's seat in 2015, he was forecasting forward to budget 2018. He said in budget 2018, servicing the national debt would cost €9 billion and corporation tax receipts would be €5 billion. As we know, in 2018 corporation tax receipts were €10 billion and servicing the national debt cost half of the €9 billion projection. Every red cent of that surplus has been embedded in day-to-day spending and the cupboard is bare. Whatever else is said about Fianna Fáil Governments in the 2000s, approximately €26 billion was put in the National Pensions Reserve Fund. That made the crash, as awful as it was, a little softer than it could have been.

Michael Tutty is a member of IFAC who I believe to be a former official at the Department of Finance, although I could be wrong in that regard. Within the past month, when he attended as a witness before the Committee on Budgetary Oversight, he stated that we are back to where we have been in the past. It is only in the past three or four months that the Minister for Finance has been taking on board the regular and sustained criticism from the Committee on Budgetary Oversight. Those are my comments on the national context.

My next point relates to Dublin, Dublin transport and climate action measures.

Nothing has been done to bridge the gap between now and the completion of the proposals in the Government's much vaunted Project Ireland 2040. Even if the latter are successful, a passenger could not set foot on the metro or travel on the BusConnects corridors until around 2027. Deputies Curran, Haughey and others representing Dublin have raised this issue in numerous debates in this House. There is nothing to bridge the gap between the here and now and when all of those projects are built out, if they are built out. As I have said before, a baby born today will be lucky to set foot on the metro when he or she is 12 and about to start secondary school. There is nothing to offset the air quality issues and the chronic traffic congestion that we are experiencing in Dublin between now and 2027.

The Government's climate action plan refers to 950,000 electric cars, but I suspect that such technology may be bypassed in the next three or four years. The Government's plan is all about e-cars and there is no mention of e-bikes. On the Continent, the Belgians are the leaders in this area, followed by the Dutch, Danes and Scandinavians. In cities in particular, e-bikes are seen as a really practical and efficient solution for journeys in the 5 km to 8 km range and they are tax-incentivised in major ways in the aforementioned countries. There is no mention of e-bikes in the Government's climate action plan or in the budget. There are no incentives for employees or employers in that context. Regardless of whether a general election comes sooner or later, if Fine Gael prepares a manifesto that refers to e-cycling, we can tell the public that the party had eight years in power and prepared a climate action plan in which it is never mentioned. It had a budget in which it could have introduced practical measures to bridge the gap between now and 2027 but it had nothing to say about e-cycling.

The Government's climate action measures are for those who are in the fortunate position of having considerable savings or being reasonably well off. Most people in this House, including myself, could not afford to purchase an e-car, to make that big leap from a diesel car. I speak for many citizens in the country when I say that and Deputy Lisa Chambers made the same point earlier today. Most citizens could not afford the expense of a total deep retrofit of their homes, although they may be able to do small pieces of it, step by step. The difficulty is that one must have money up front to do any of these projects. We need to take a long, hard look at how we approach this issue and how we assist people. At the moment, all of the measures seem to be aimed at those who have disposable income or substantial savings, at people who can part with significant sums of money up front to draw down the admittedly generous grants that are available.

On the cycling budget, cyclist.ieis tweeting away in response to an infograph from the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport on spending on cycling in the budget. It is not able to tie down the exact figure for Dublin cycling and neither am I. It has become lost in greenways. In the context of BusConnects, the Minister referred in his contribution earlier to 200 km of cycle lanes. In the great cycle plan of 2013, reference was made to 600 km of cycle track in Dublin, so the ambition and the bar keeps being lowered.

At a constituency level, the cut in the Department of Education and Skills schools building projects budget worries me because there are a number of proposed projects in my area, including a proposed post-primary school in Citywest, a Gaelscoil in Knocklyon and numerous other projects. I echo some of the points made by my party colleague, Deputy Curran, on the most vulnerable special needs children and their parents. We have advocated very strongly on their behalf in this House during this Dáil. We have been calling for additional autism spectrum disorder, ASD, units but a cut, for the first time in seven years, to the Department's building budget is not good news.

One of the items that Fianna Fáil stitched into the confidence and supply agreement was an increase in the number of gardaí, and I welcome the announcement of another 700 gardaí. Apart from housing and health, which are two of the biggest issues of concern, there is also growing concern about anti-social behaviour as a result of the lack of community gardaí. Senior gardaí will say that there has been a serious increase in teenager-on-teenager anti-social behaviour. That is happening in a number of pockets of my constituency and is not exclusive to some areas.

On the matter of affordable housing, my colleague referred to so-called social housing supports as opposed to social housing. The former means the housing assistance payment, HAP, and we are spending in excess of €1 billion on that scheme. Deputy Curran talked about young people being excluded from the housing market. There was an example very recently in my constituency where 13 houses went through the normal planning process, were granted permission and built, but a housing association bought every one of them. That is very good news for people who are on the housing list but bad news for young first-time buyers who wanted to return to this part of Tallaght to buy their first home. We are not building anything like the number of social and private houses that we need. I heard some of my rural colleagues speak about rents of €1,500 per month but rents are €2,000 per month in parts of my constituency. That money is going into a big black hole. Subsidised, affordable housing is the way forward.

In terms of health, I am concerned about the intensive care unit, ICU, that is to be built in Tallaght Hospital. I am also concerned about the waiting lists, carers, and children with special needs, many of whom are on huge waiting lists for speech and language therapy, for example. They get three sessions of therapy after a wait of two or three years. That allows the officials to tick the box to say that they have had their speech therapy. They must then go to the bottom of the waiting list again and wait for another two or three years for more therapy. Unless their families have money, they cannot get the vital support and assistance they so badly need in their early developing years.

As Deputy Cowen said earlier, were it not for Brexit, we would have been in an election scenario before now. We have done our duty by the country in facilitating aspects of this but that does mean it is an endorsement. There is sufficient material here, particularly with regard to the Government's competence in terms of managing the economy, upon which the public will ultimately deliver an answer in a general election.

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