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

I am happy to have the opportunity to speak in this short debate on this technical order on the carry-over of capital expenditure. The Social Democrats are happy to acknowledge that they do not, in principle, have an issue with this and will comply with the requirement of a Dáil approval for that order. There is no doubt that the figure we are carrying over is very substantial at close to €710 million. It will be added to the expected capital expenditure for next year, bringing the total capital expenditure to €10.8 billion. This is a massive sum.

I am not going to stand here today calling for particular projects in my own constituency to be funded because that is not the approach that should be taken, even though we will hear those pleas from many Members. That is one of the fundamental problems associated with how we spend money in this country. This is not the money of any party or of the Government, it is the people’s money. There should be an assurance from the Government that that money will be spent wisely and fairly. Unfortunately, we have not seen that in the past. Big decisions about big capital and other expenditures are very much related to what are regarded as political priorities. It is more about holding seats than doing what is right by the people. There is a very strong public demand to get away from that nonsense and to stop this idea that if one does not have a Minister in Cabinet then one’s constituency is going to lose out. That has probably been the case since time began in this country but it is wrong and should not be the case. It has also resulted in a great deal of money being wasted and spent in areas where it was not needed. The corollary of that is that there are many areas which have been completely starved of funding. That kind of approach is just not good enough and is not one that is taken, for example, in other countries. I have looked at this in some detail in respect of health expenditure but this applies right across the board. It should not be a matter of who shouts the loudest, who has the most well-resourced lobby group or who has the most clout in Cabinet. That is a very outdated and unfair way of approaching the whole issue of spending. We should move to a much more transparent and progressive way of taking decisions on public expenditure. It should be on the basis of an objective resource allocation. This is standard practice across the rest of Europe. When it comes to spending in whatever area it is, one builds a resource allocation model that is objective. One looks at and profiles the different parts of the country in terms of socioeconomic status, from an age perspective, from a rural perspective or from an intense urban deprivation perspective. All of those types of factors play into the status of any particular area.

That is what we should be doing. We have the data to do that in small areas. The late Trutz Haase did exceptional work in this area which fed into some of the model that we built into the Department of Health back in 2011-2012. That work needs to be built on. Let us do away with this pork barrel type of politics, about who can shout the loudest or who has political clout and develop a way spending money in this country, which is the people’s money, in a way that is fair and achieves the objectives that we have set out for the country in developing into a modern, progressive and fair country that actually works. That is why we have services that just do not function. People ask why on earth we cannot have decent public transport, why housing is so expensive or why we cannot have access to proper healthcare. All of these things are taken for granted in other modern, progressive countries but do not happen here. My fundamental message to the Minister is to take an objective and transparent approach to the spending of money and set criteria by which he can gauge the wisdom of those decisions.

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