Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am coming to that. I have been a member of three governments now, including a Government involving the Labour Party. We have put a huge amount of time, care and resources into putting right some of the wrongs of the past, even where there is no legal liability on the State. We have put in place a compensation scheme, for example, for symphysiotomy. In that case, the survivors went to court and they lost their case. Even though they lost their case in court, the Government decided anyway to set up a compensation scheme, which we did. Another scheme that we set up was for the Magdalen laundries, and we are setting one up for the mother and baby institutions, mica and pyrite, and apartment block defects. There were no findings of liability at all against the State in those cases.

They were not fought in court. On the contrary, we decided to set up schemes to help those people because we thought that was the right and just thing to do. How the Deputy is characterising this is not fair. She is taking a few examples and extrapolating those to every issue that has arisen. That is not fair at all. We set up those compensation schemes because they were the right thing to do and not because we lost, or were at risk of losing, court cases.

The Government has a responsibility to do what is right and just. We also have a responsibility to protect the taxpayer and the common good. We cannot spend the same euro twice. We want the education budget to be spent on educating children and young people today, we want the health budget to be spent on people who are sick and need medicine today, and we want the budget for children to be spent on children who are vulnerable today. If too much of today's budget is diverted to fixing the problems of the past, that has consequences. Governments and Ministers have to strike a balance between the future and the past. We try to strike that balance as fairly as possible.

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