Thomas Pringle (Donegal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The issue of a walk-in service for renewal of a driving licence or the contracting out of the NDLS may appear to many in this House to be inconsequential or beneath the usual high-brow issues more becoming of deliberation in the Dáil Chamber. At face value, that may appear to be true but we must realise that these are just two examples of a steady creep of the incessant rolling back of public service provision brought in by successive Fine Gael and Fianna Fail Governments. Moreover, we need to recognise that these are symptoms of a disease, not the disease itself. The symptoms are the obliteration of State-provided universal public service and its direct replacement with for-profit privatisation where buzzwords such as "efficiency" and "streamlining" serve only to mask the reduction of services or the removal of universal service obligation as a core tenet.

Any doctor knows full well that treating the symptoms only goes so far and that the disease must be cured. The identification of the disease is not difficult. It is unfettered capitalism. It is the kind espoused and perfected in America by zealots such as Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago. Actions such as using the cover of the pandemic to remove the walk-in service at the likes of the NLDS are well-documented moves straight from Friedman playbook. Naomi Klein, in the opening pages of her seminal work, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism describes this well, saying of Friedman, "[In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina] One of those who saw opportunity in the floodwaters of New Orleans was Milton Friedman, grand guru of the movement for unfettered capitalism". He proposed the privatisation of the school system, and backed by the Bush administration, Klein describes what happened next:

In sharp contrast to the glacial pace with which levees were repaired and the electricity grid brought back online, the auctioning off of the New Orleans' school system took place with military speed and precision.

[...]

Before Hurricane Katrina, the school board had run 123 public schools; now it ran just 4.

This perverse ideology was championed by Friedman and then found its natural home within the regimes of Reagan and Thatcher, but driven by a vast cohort of lobbyists and their money.

Where did the ideology in question take hold in this country? We must look back to the first act of a Romeo and Juliet-type story that continues to play out before us in this Chamber today. I refer to the unfinished saga of the merging of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, and the unfortunate genes that appear to have become dominant in the offspring. It begins with the convergence of right-wing elements of both parties into the Progressive Democrats in the mid-1980s. What we saw emerge was a small cabal that exerted an undue influence over Irish economic policy that was far beyond their representation in the Dáil or the appeal of those policies to the people. However, propped up by their wilful enablers in Fianna Fail, they did damage that has continued to the present day, with the contagion now having spread and taken control within Fine Gael. Sadly, when I look across the floor, I see only a small group of fundamentalists but they are in control of strategic Ministries of Government despite not leading it at present. This gang of four or five in Fine Gael appear destined to continue leading the party into the future according to media speculation, as the rest play bit-part roles as mere cheerleaders who attend openings, make local announcements and cut and paste their names into head office press releases for the local media. They are the golden scissors brigade.

I am not sure whether this is due to the apathy or ineptitude of those on the Opposition benches who appear to function almost exclusively on the basis of a mentality of “I'm just happy to be here” . I am sure of one thing, however. The days when backbench Deputies could vote in here to privatise public services or dubiously auction State assets, such as mobile phone licences, or close post offices and Garda stations and then scurry back to their constituencies and claim to be against the very same decisions, are coming to an end. You are being caught out and called out. The people are better informed and see through this. It is the death by a 1,000 cuts nature of the privatisation of services and the inevitable reduction of that service that follows which most gets to people. It is also the nature of who ends up worse off. It is easy for ourselves in here or younger citizens to navigate new online systems so the burden falls on the older generations or those without broadband, who tend to live in rural areas, or those who simply cannot afford a broadband service. These are the people targeted by such moves. They are the very people that this Government is willing to discard and sweep aside in pursuit of its privatisation agenda, which is often miscategorised as being in the name of progress.

This is why the motion to restore the NLDS walk-in service is important. It is important to my constituents in Donegal because most of us will wait until 2025 for the Government to roll out broadband to us. It is important for my constituents in Donegal because we have a higher proportion of older people than is the case nationally. It is important to my constituents in Donegal because we have lower disposable incomes and higher deprivation rates than most of the country. These issues are common to most of us who live in rural constituencies right across the western seaboard. It is vitally important that these services remain in public ownership and remain available to the public as walk-in services, which is the least that we can expect the Government to provide to citizens.

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