Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

Given the unprecedented circumstances in which we find ourselves, it is no surprise that we are talking about an unprecedented level of public expenditure. So far this year, expenditure has grossly exceeded projections and that is all down to the Covid pandemic. We are in the most extraordinary of circumstances and we all accept the underlying reasons for the substantial additional expenditure. My party very much supports the approach that has been taken by the Government in prioritising public health and the health measures that needed to be put in place urgently and on a continuing basis in the fight against Covid. We also very much support what the Government has done to protect jobs and provide income supports for the many thousands of people who suffered and continue to suffer a major shock to their economic circumstances and their ability to earn a living.

However, the experience over the past six or seven months has exposed very graphically the weaknesses in how we provide public services. Some of us have been beating that drum for a long time but some of those in government have denied this was the case and have instead preferred to talk about tax cuts and to make promises to people which did not have any basis in economic or social policy. There was a playing to the gallery in regard to tax cuts while ignoring the fundamental problems we have in this country in respect of how we provide public services. Most other modern European countries regard public services as being for all of the public. Public services should be universal services that are available to everybody, not what some people in this Government think they are, namely, services for low-income groups or the poor. The progressive way of running a society and economy is to provide universal public services. Doing so benefits everybody. It helps to avoid exclusion and inequality and it also drives down the cost of living. If people can access healthcare or any other public service on a universal basis, it gives them more disposable income and also ensures the heat is taken out of wage demands. Fundamentally, it is a more efficient way of providing services and also a fairer way of doing so.

Huge issues have been exposed in terms of how our public services are provided. This is especially true of healthcare and social care. It is also the case with childcare and the privatised model that has been followed. We can see the problems with how we fund education services, including the high dependency on income from foreign students, which is not a sustainable way of funding the education system. In the case of housing, there are few or no protections for renters and we have completely failed in making housing affordable for people. For that reason, special measures had to be put in place. It was the right thing to do but lessons should be learned from it. As we move to a more sustainable longer-term situation, the funding we apply now should be based around there being no going back to the old way of doing things. Investment should be based on achieving reform at the same time as spending. It must be focused on bringing about effective changes in how we provide public services.

The Irish Congress of Trade Unions, ICTU, recently launched a very good document, entitled No Going Back. That should be the message from the Government, that there is no going back to the old way of doing things. There must be no going back to the two-tier health service, for instance, and the lack of adequacy of our public services generally. All public services should be provided on a universal basis.

We can actually do that now because we have the potential to borrow at very significant levels. Money is available at 0% interest rates and sometimes at negative ones. That capacity is there at the moment and it makes absolute sense to avail of that borrowing capacity in order to provide investment in services which will make our society and our economy much more sustainable. This is, therefore, an opportunity as well as a crisis. The other important point we must keep to the fore is that any recovery plan must ensure it is a job-centred recovery. For the moment, that means continuing with the labour market supports but in the longer term it means looking at how we create high-quality, high-worth jobs. Too often in the past we have been happy to accept precarious, low-paid jobs. This is an opportunity to right that wrong. The other side of that is providing adequate supports on an ongoing basis to businesses and there must be undertakings in that respect.

I refer to spending overall and the excess spending we have seen so far. I wish to address the issue of testing and tracing, the strategy for it and the fact that we have never been able to ramp up and gear up the testing and tracing system to the point that is required. From the beginning, we have been promised that this would be the case and that our main strategy was testing, tracing and isolating. We have never done that to the extent and at the speed required. Every time I have spoken on Covid in this House, going back to the very first debates, I have said that unless we get testing and tracing right, none of the rest can be properly dealt with. It is fundamental to everything we are doing in this country and six or seven months down the road we still have not got up to that capacity of 100,000 tests per week and we still do not have the staff to provide that service. I do not know why those staff were not recruited during the summer months. We are continuing to redeploy people from critical areas of the health service into testing and tracing, leaving important areas like speech and language therapy, audiology and other key parts of our health service understaffed and exposed. We should have the additional staff in place by now. It is really unforgivable that the lull during the summer months was not availed of in order to do that.

There are also questions about the precise expenditure on testing and tracing. The Government sanctioned funding of €206 million in 2020 for this purpose, although the HSE has estimated that the potential cost will be as high as €414 million. That is if full capacity is used and we should be up to full capacity at this stage. In the first half of the year, however, less than €50 million was spent. I have a suspicion that that is why we did not gear up the testing and tracing system, namely, that a brake was put on the resources available to do what was necessary. This raises a lot of questions about why so little was spent in the first half of the year and why we have not done that if our primary strategy is to flatten the curve and suppress the virus. In the past seven days Minsters have been speaking about 77,000 tests. It is supposed to be 100,000 so it is falling well short of that.

On nursing homes and the additional expenditure there, this is again exposing a system which does not work. Substantial additional funding had to be used as a bailout for nursing homes. It is absolutely critical that we continue to provide that funding. There are questions about why we are doing that in a situation where 80% of nursing homes are privatised and tax-incentivised. They are supposed to be profit-making and indeed they are, so why is the State bailing out the sector? We have to do what we have to do now but a reckoning will have to come very shortly about that, along with an acceptance that the model is absolutely wrong.

I have a brief point to make about aviation. Our aviation sector is on its knees. There have been huge problems with the failure to deal with the whole question of international travel which I will not repeat. Some 140,000 jobs depend on the sector. There are 4,000 people working in Aer Lingus, which is the only national carrier that has not got state aid from its national government. This is an issue that must be addressed urgently. These people have been left swinging in the wind because the Government has not been prepared to step up and put in place the kind of funding required to support that sector. Unless that is done there is a very serious risk Aer Lingus will collapse. It needs urgent attention by Government, the company needs State aid urgently and we need to see the implementation of the recommendations of the aviation recovery task force.

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