Matt Shanahan (Waterford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Everett McKinley Dirksen, a US politician and civil rights activist, coined the famous phrase, "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money". Never in the history of the State have we had as large a sum of public money to disburse. It is €85.8 billion next year, up 6.5% on last year. With that also, never has our national debt been higher. It is €241 billion. Now we are talking real money. This whopping number is double the national debt at the end of 2011, which stood at €119 billion.

As before, a lot of public resources will be wasted in the mismanagement of that expenditure. I point the Minister of State toThe Irish Timesyesterday where the HSE announced an agreement to bring orthopaedic patients to Alicante to a new hospital built for €60 million, and how that compares to our dysfunctional procurement of the national children's hospital, now approaching €2 billion. No one knows how this poly-crisis affecting the global economy will unfold but in this country we had better hope and pray we have seen the worst of it because we are running out of wriggle room in the coming years if it gets any worse.

This Government, like all previous Governments, is all too quick to spend its way out of the early stages of a crisis. Have we not learned anything from the national nightmares of past years, all of which started with domestic financial indiscipline? Have we learned nothing from our past over-reliance on an unstable tax base? In the past, it was stamp duty from construction activity. Today it is corporate tax from foreign direct investment, FDI. Why is there a real unwillingness to tackle competitiveness and productivity issues in our economy, particularly in our mollycoddled professions of medicine, construction, finance, insurance, retail and law? Of course we would need measures to support the most vulnerable in the cost-of-living crisis but much more needs to be done to tackle the root cause of inflation in our competitive sectors.

We need to fix our own house before seeking the help of the international debt markets or the kindness of strangers, or implementing aggressive corporate tax strategies. These do much damage to our international reputation for being a well-managed economic partner.

Regarding the announced summer economic statement, the Government is signalling that it is keeping all people happy all of the time. It is now a magic money tree whose aspiration is to deliver a package that works to protect the long-term wellness of our economy and society but at significant cost. Not only is the Government spending fecklessly, we cannot see where the money goes.

I had two clarifying exchanges in the Dáil last week. In the first, the Tánaiste confirmed that he shares my view that the data in the summer economic statement is inadequate to allow Dáil oversight. When I put it to him that this was to give Cabinet members a free hand to support their own pet projects, largely in Cork and Dublin, the home constituencies of almost all senior Ministers, he could not refute my point using any data. In the summer economic statement we get again foggy sentiment rather than hard data and nothing like the proper granular data on public spending that we need, in particular on capital projects, as are available to every other OECD parliament. This feeds the practical sense that vast parts of Ireland, particularly the north east and west, midlands and our region of the south east, are frozen out of a fair share of capital spending. We see the money going in. It is €87 billion this year, €12 billion of which is going on capital projects. Of this €12 billion, the south east should get €1 billion and Waterford should get €300 million. With the data available to me, I estimate the south east got just €330 million, one third of its due.

The second clarifying discussion I had was with the Taoiseach on the recent vote of confidence. In exchange for durable and reliable support for the Government in the current and next semesters, I asked for nothing more than concrete delivery on the regional priorities committed to in the programme for Government and reiteratedad nauseam by Cabinet members. Priorities in acute healthcare, education and transport are what I sought. I asked the Taoiseach to provide political hope to the south east that some or any of our priorities would advance. I was not gauche enough to raise any specific project. I simply asked him to point to something positive in the works for the region, anything that was aligned with Government policy and regional priorities. I am sad to say that nothing could be identified.

I am repeatedly on the record of the House seeking explicit advancement of regional rather than constituency priorities. I will likely be asked to vote for the budget in the coming months, despite Government being unable to show any project in the works for the south east or any advance on the capital for the region's acute healthcare or capital investment in our higher education or infrastructure. All this in a region equating to 10% of the country. A billion euro here, a billion euro there and nothing like the €1 billion that is its fair share for the south-east region.

The future will tell if this summer economic statement was a macroeconomic mistake or a lost opportunity to get our house in order before further international hardship bites. However, it is clear, and the Tánaiste agrees, that it is a technically flawed presentation of our State's financial circumstances. We have the sizzle but are missing the sausage. We have engaging oratory and unengaged data. Along with that, our Taoiseach has made clear it holds nothing for the south-east region. Perhaps that is a shortcoming that can be addressed but the clock is counting down. If this summer economic statement is a requiem to celebrate the past two and a half years of the present Dáil's tenure, it is obvious that the snuff of this wake was and is reserved solely for Dublin and Cork consumption.

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