Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Deputy Ó Snodaigh has been asking these legitimate questions for a number of years and always attracts a bit of media attention when he poses them, although they have been posed in this House for much longer than Deputy Ó Snodaigh has been here. The Minister will recall that when we were debating the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission (Amendment) Bill last week, I told him I used to work in these Houses for then Labour Party spokesperson on finance, Derek McDowell, in 1998 and 1999.

He was asking those questions at that time. As the Minister remembers, back in 1998 and 1999, there certainly was a good reason for having a strong secret service to protect the security of the State. Members opposite will be familiar with that reason. We can call the Minister "M" now, apparently, which is a new one on me. I am grateful for Deputy Ó Snodaigh's contribution in that regard.

I am pleased to contribute to the debate on this important Bill. Its passage is constitutionally required to enable the State to expend the resources allocated to the Executive by the Dáil. This is a very onerous responsibility that is placed on us all but, surprisingly, it attracts little attention outside the House. There is a constitutional obligation on us to pass the legislation but, sadly, there is not a queue of speakers lining up outside the Chamber. If Deputies had known they could mention various projects in their constituencies, the debate might have seemed a different prospect. I was going to say I do not expect to use the entire 20 minutes allocated to me but, given the lack of speakers, which seems to have been a trend over the past three years, I might use most of the time. We will see how we proceed.

The Labour Party will support the Bill on the basis that it provides the resources and moneys that are required to run the public services on which we all depend. It is usually a fairly straightforward matter of business in the House. I note that the appropriation of sums voted for supply of services under section 1 of the Bill amounts to just over €73 billion, compared with a net amount voted by the Dáil last year of €69.7 billion. Gross expenditure this year will, of course, be well ahead of that €73 billion, coming in at just under €89 billion. Some of those moneys relate to the exceptional demands on services and the exceptional expenditures the House was asked to resource the Government to allocate arising from the impact of the pandemic. However, significant amounts are now in the base, especially in regard to the health services. These moneys are needed to fund better health services into the future. It took a pandemic for the scales to be knocked away from some people's eyes and the extent to which many of our public services were in trouble to be revealed for all to see.

Before the Covid crisis, we had the lowest levels of general government expenditure in the EU. We are playing catch-up with our peers in terms of investment in housing, health, education, skills development and so on. We need to ramp that expenditure up and, crucially, it needs to be targeted and managed properly. I am grateful to Deputy Clarke for mentioning the hospice projects, which she was right to do. There are two separate but related projects in terms of hospice-related interventions, one in Tullamore and the other in my home town of Drogheda. The latter is proceeding slowly and has received resources, which were announced last Friday by the Department of Health. I know that when the time is right, the local hospice organisations will be very much involved in the delivery and planning of those services. I work with those organisations all the time to support their important work.

An issue that certainly is relevant to this legislation is the latest set of Exchequer returns published last week, which show an underspend of €2.6 billion at this point in the year. Spending is 3.4% behind target, with €1.5 billion of the underspend, according to the figures, on the capital side, with the remainder relating to current spending. The worst offenders are the Department of Health, incorporating the HSE, and the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage. It takes some explaining as to why the expected outturn for the Department of Health at this stage in the year is €896 million below what was expected. Will the Minister explain why this is the case? Earlier this year, the HSE planned to recruit an additional 14,000 staff but the latest figures I have had sight of suggest the headcount has increased by only some 7,000. Members of the Government have said, rightly so, that they want to see the deployment of more vaccinators across the country to support the Covid-19 booster vaccination programme. That campaign has been sluggish, including in my area, and people, unfortunately, are paying the price for that. It needs to be upgraded and expedited. I am told by HSE personnel in my region and nationally that one of the reasons we do not have a Covid-19 vaccination centre or testing facility in Drogheda, which is the largest town in the country, is that there are difficulties in finding nurses and pharmacists to administer the vaccines and operate the centres. That needs attention. The HSE is way behind its expected expenditure in the middle of a pandemic and there are clearly issues with recruiting and retaining staff. Does that explain the significant underspend at this point in the year by the executive and the Department of Health?

On the capital side, the recent figures show an underspend of €415 million by the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage. That is extremely frustrating, not just for me as a public representative dealing with people who are on housing lists, want to buy their own home or are at risk of homelessness but, more importantly, it is even more frustrating for those who are waiting to be allocated public housing, waiting for an affordable house or waiting and saving responsibly for a deposit on a home that is beyond their reach. Will the Minister confirm what he expects the underspend in the Department to be for 2021 and how many public and affordable homes it expects to be built by year's end?

There is a real divergence between the latest figures and those predicted by what I call the crystal ball gazers in the Department of Finance. Once again, they got their forecasts incredibly wrong. I acknowledge that forecasting the performance of the economy in the context of the disruptive effect of Covid-19 has been particularly difficult, but they were €5.4 billion wide of the mark. It is a good problem to have. I am long enough in these Houses to remember a period when that was the type of problem a Minister for Finance and a government would like to have. I am not claiming it is not a good problem to have. Corporation tax is running well ahead of forecasts, VAT receipts are €1 billion ahead and income tax receipts are €1 billion more than forecast. These are signs of an economy that is working really well. They show that the performance is improving and there are more people back at work. Nevertheless, how could the Department of Finance get it so badly wrong? It is a job for the finance committee and the budgetary oversight committee, of which I am a member, to interrogate this issue in order to understand better the kind of modelling the Department is using. If it continues to get it so badly wrong, it will affect the ability of the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, his officials and his colleagues in the Department of Finance to manage the public finances properly and in an informed fashion. It will make it incredibly difficult to plan on a multi-annual basis. I hope the Minister will acknowledge that.

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