Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

Aontú is a party of fiscal and social responsibility and these two policies are often presented by the Government as opposites, but they are not. One can be fiscally responsible and socially responsible at the same time. It is possible for a country to provide for housing, health, education, transport, communications and the environment and yet be fiscally responsible. This simply means that key resources are provided consistently and fairly. It also means that expenditure is carried out in the most efficient and effective way. If one looks at the history of this State and the history of the parties that expound the most the idea of fiscal responsibility, one is actually looking at the political parties that have crashed the country financially. Looking at expenditure, the national children's hospital and the national broadband plan are examples of decisions and deliveries which are not fiscally responsible. They are fiscally irresponsible in a gross fashion in that they went substantially over budget.

In the 2000s, Fianna Fáil dressed itself up as the party of economic and fiscal expertise, while at the same time it drove the country off an economic cliff. Fine Gael also dressed itself in the clothes of fiscal responsibility. However, it continued to bail out the banks even after the EU stated that bail-ins were the logical thing to do. When the EU said that the Cypriot bank bail-in was the right thing to do, Fine Gael continued to deliver the old system of a bail-out with a significant cost that we are still paying today.

Fine Gael allowed for significant fiscal exposures to continue too. We have a substantial dependency on foreign direct investment. Foreign direct investment is positive and we welcome it, but our country is far too heavily dependent on foreign direct investment and indigenous sectors have never been developed to the extent that they should be. In most countries, foreign direct investment is considered an interim strategy to get the domestic economy to a level at which one can depend on economic activity being mostly produced by indigenous enterprises. This Government has also allowed us to become dependent on corporation tax from ten different companies.

The chief financial officers, CFOs, of ten individual companies could radically determine whether or not we have a big hole in our budget on an annual basis or policy in the United States could change radically. We have a big fiscal financial exposure also in that level of Government policy.

I will give another example. In the past number of days, I have learned of the indemnification of the vaccine. Hopefully, he vaccine will be the key to getting our country back to normality. It may well be the case that the Government will logically indemnify that process given the massive costs if it does not. However, nobody knows in this Chamber who is indemnified, how much they are indemnified for and the potential cost to the State. This particular issue has never been discussed. It is incredible that the media and political space is consumed on the issue of tweets at the moment, yet what could be hundreds of millions of euro of potential costs to the State has never been discussed properly in this Chamber.

Deputies have been kept like mushrooms, in the dark and covered, unfortunately, with manure.

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