Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for introducing this motion. It is appropriate and I fully support the concept that the rainy day fund should be used this year to deal with the significant crisis created by Covid.

5 o’clock

Economic stabilisation is really important. However, while we are focused now on the urgency of dealing with Covid, we must also create space for embarking on what is a phase of truly transformative change that will happen in Ireland over the next ten years. In that time, we are going to have to halve our greenhouse gas emissions, which will involve truly massive changes in the way we live. We will have to accommodate the ageing of our population, which will result in the number of workers per retired person go from 2.5 to fewer than 1.5, on its way down to well below one in the years after that. Our cities outside of Dublin will have to grow at twice the rate of Dublin. We are going to have to cope with Brexit, Covid, and digital change. This is massive infrastructural change on a scale we have not seen. There will be massive policy change and massive behavioural change. This requires that we now prepare to be able to undertake this change on an unprecedented scale. We have an opportunity with the review of the €120 billion national development plan, the new national economic plan and the €5 billion contingency the Government has set aside over the coming 12 months. We must use this opportunity now to design new policy tools that are adequate for the scale of the challenge we are embarking upon. At the end of this decade, we must have a resilient enterprise sector and a resilient public service that can meet much higher expectations in the midst of this massive change. We must enjoy a higher standard of living for our people, having made the change.

What will be at a premium is our capacity to adapt very rapidly in policy terms. We need to speed up if we are to achieve this. We have seen many cases where needed change has been delayed unnecessarily. We have not always been able to seize the early mover advantage. We have done so in many key enterprise sectors but not generally in some of the more traditional sectors and in the public service itself.

We have to deliver a number of critical factors now if we are going to be able to undertake change in a much more rapid manner. There is the issue of legitimacy and at the heart of the next decade of transformation, we need a new social contract. It has been articulated in the programme for Government and it must be given new life. The type of threats people will encounter during this period of rapid transformation will be very different. Ageing throws up particular difficulties. Dealing with greenhouse gas and changing behaviour throw up particular difficulties and they will focus on particular communities. The concept of consultation will have to be strengthened. Our planning process gets bogged down in endless delays, even for infrastructure that is recognised as very needed. We have to find a way of breaking the logjam that has become a feature of our system. Some of the elements are there. Our success with the Citizens' Assembly in climate and many other areas shows us the way. Climate dialogue shows us the way. We need to move to a planning system that can embrace more negotiated portfolios of developments for our cities, sectors and land use throughout our community so there are community gains that can easily give capacity to deliver big projects. Our present system is far too adversarial and we need to think about how this will be changed.

We also need new capacity in the public service to deliver at scale and at pace. This is something we have found difficult to do, most notably in areas such as housing and health. We are beginning to see the seeds of the new approach. The Land Development Agency is a new groundbreaking approach, whereby the State will take the role of shaping the nature of development in our country. The national broadband plan points a new way to how public and private can co-operate to scale ambitious objectives and deliver them in a timely way. There are other large capital projects for which we must now mobilise. For example, the State needs to lead the way in offshore renewable energy and commit now to building a platform for this, which we have not yet done. We must undertake to have the capacity to do land use planning in a more strategic and long-term way than we have done in the past.

I am disappointed that the preventative unit in the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform has been wound down. Never has it been more important that we start to think about long-term preventative policies. The closing down of the unit is a mistake. We need to invest massively in leadership at every level in the private sector and, most particularly, in the public sector, building the capacity to lead, and have honest conversations about what we are trying to achieve and how to bring about improvement. This is something we have not been good at and we need to make the time available for it.

We need boldness in action to match the boldness of the ambition we are undertaking in terms of transformative change. Shakespeare described Macbeth as being not without ambition but without the illness that should attend it. We have a problem in that we are very strong on ambition in this country but without some of the capacity to undertake the changes that are necessary to deliver it.

Another area where we need to plan for massive change is regulatory infrastructure. There will be significant changes in the expectations of the financial system as it starts to invest in long-term green technologies. This needs to be built into the regulatory environment. Our managing of data and how they are used needs a new regulatory infrastructure. Our capacity to protect citizens at this time of difficult transition needs strengthening.

The Minister is handling in an extraordinarily competent way the challenges we are facing. Ireland has been fortunate to have had the steady hand we have seen at the tiller in the Department of Finance. Now the challenge is to plan, and to find the space to do the planning for the long-term future in this period of transformative change. Space has to be created in the public service to do this long-term planning in a way I do not think we are now equipped to do. These are changes in the way we manage assets in this country, the way invest in them at scale, the way we mobilise private investment and the way we regulate and deliver the sort of community we want to build. These need considerable thought, time and effort in our public service. People are working hugely and urgently to deliver in the short term and we need to find space to do important thinking for the future. I would like structures to be put in place that can allow this thinking and make sure we are ahead of many of these challenges that are coming on us at a very fast pace. I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute on this important matter.

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