Michael McNamara (Clare, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I do not disagree with the terms of the motion regarding a rainy day fund. However, and maybe this is just my disposition, I am not quite as optimistic for the Irish economy as the Minister of State is. I welcome the image he has portrayed. He has no alternative but to portray that image, at least in public, although perhaps it is a belief he shares in private as well. It is not just that we are not replenishing a rainy day fund, which I do not have a problem with because if ever there was a rainy day, it would be during a pandemic, but the amount of debt we are incurring, and the amount of spending and how little we have to show for it, are what concern me. Obviously, we are not putting money away now because we need to spend money.

The general message I am hearing from economists, even to ordinary people, is that now is not the time to save money but the time to spend it because it might not be worth nearly what it is worth now in a year or two or in ten years' time if they saved it. That is because the only way we can deal with the kind of moneys being borrowed by almost every country, but especially this country, is inflation. I asked the Minister for Finance, who, more importantly from the point of view of any influence on monetary policy, is also the chair of the eurozone group of finance ministers, if he had any issue with inflation. I asked that because of the effect it is having on ordinary people, which I will come to in a moment. He said he did not. That is understandable because if we enter a period of quantitative tightening, one of the first things that will be impacted will be the ability to sell Government bonds. The fact that they are very attractive to international financiers should not necessarily be taken as a compliment because what else are they going to spend their money on in the current climate?

The Minister for Finance made an interesting speech at the end of the debate on the Finance Bill and it is one I would like to take up with him in person. He talked about the use of language and said we needed to be able to have a reasonable, rational debate. That is something I would agree with but in the same week, the Minister for Health, who is the Minister of State's party colleague, albeit a relatively new-found one, sat exactly where he is now and sent out a tweet saying that everybody who opposed his view was reckless. We do not live in a system of eine Stimme. It is not our way. It is not democracy and it never should be. We cannot label people who question things. We had a Minister for Finance who sat where the Minister of State is now and spoke about "pinkos". I notice, by the way, that the Minister of State is wearing a nice pink shirt and red tie. He referred to the pinkos and liberals who were questioning the orthodoxy of the Ahern years and the economic approach of Bertie Ahern. I am not here to vilify the man. There were achievements during his reign, particularly the Good Friday Agreement.

To question and debate is a good thing in any democracy. I have questioned and will continue to question the value that we are getting for the money we are spending on Covid response. Our expenditure increased by 20% last year. The European average was about 10% and the expenditure of countries like France and Denmark only increased by about 6%, in comparison with their infection rates, if we want to use that as the metric. I do not think we can measure a society by infection rates or start to look at fellow human beings as mere carriers of pathogens. It is a very sad state of affairs if there is no "I" or "You" in society but mere carriers of pathogens. We are not getting value for money. Nor, by the way, are we getting value for the relatively paltry infrastructural investment we are making at the moment. Over €100 million has been spent on the national broadband scheme to date and only 2,700 premises have been connected. We have no idea what the overrun on the national children's hospital will be.

We need to look at how this State spends money. Interest rates, most assuredly, will not always be where they are now. Money will not always be as available as it is now. That is what the rainy day fund was about. I do not have a problem with the fact that the Government is not putting money into it now but I do have a problem with running a Department of Finance on the basis that cheap money will always be available in abundance because that is simply not the case.

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