Matt Shanahan (Waterford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Before I start, I mark the passing of Ollie Cleary, a past mayor of Waterford and somebody who campaigned tirelessly for 20 years for the South East Technological University, SETU.

It is show time all over again. I feel as though somebody should stand up and question the wisdom of breaking the fiscal rules in developing this budget, particularly given how without the windfall corporation taxes, we are actually operating a deficit in real terms. These are fiscal rules that have been developed by the Government to try to avoid the mistakes of the past and to avoid the pain and trauma of boom and bust.

I somewhat remember the mistakes of the late 1970s. I certainly remember the pain of the 1980s, only to see the mistakes of the noughties - if ever there was an aptly named decade - and to see the horror of the global financial crisis subsequently cutting our country to ribbons. When will we learn that economic indiscipline in the good times causes deep social and cultural carnage when times go bad? In my opinion, on the night before a budget, every Minister for Finance should read Jean-Claude Trichet’s letters to Brian Lenihan. Of course, we need to address the pressures to deliver on health, housing and infrastructure and to meet climate obligations, but every Department and part of the Government is getting a bump, like they always do. We are giving out participation awards without any connection to performance or delivery or even looking at deploying areas of the Government that no longer make sense in the contexts of full employment and the other pressing needs of our citizens.

The Irish Government Economic and Evaluation Service does some nice work, but without political cover, as does the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, IFAC, but they are being increasingly ignored. Without a serious political effort at a root-and-branch level for spending reviews, we will never clean out the stable and will never make serious reforms. We will continue to fail to meet the public’s demand for better services.

Just look at the slow strangulation of Sláintecare, forgetting that the Irish people were promised universal healthcare in 2011. In 2017, Sláintecare was presented as a genuine, all-party attempt to renew and reform healthcare in Ireland. Yet, even before the pandemic, it looked as though it had been dumped in favour of projects: trophy projects, grandiose projects and the most delusional blue sky projects. We pleased the Dublin and Cork health industries by allowing them to press ahead while other regions were left to starve. Six years later, the only answer to our woeful health system is to throw more money at it. Indeed, budget 2024 throws more money at it than we have spent a decade throwing money at it, but without much progress. If we cannot do a sustainable budget when we have surpluses and full employment, when can we do it? The time to fix our roof is when the sun is shining. Despite all the headwinds and the mixed signals, the Government’s coffers are full, and that means the sun is shining now.

Of course, I can say this. I can emphasise the importance of keeping the Government’s spending under control because I am from Waterford. The south east, like the midlands and the Border region, is not fully at this national spendathon. Regional GDP continues to fall behind in these regions. There is a massive deficit in high-quality, new knowledge economy jobs, which are usually IDA-supported jobs. The kicker is that the Government refuses to undertake transformative capital projects in these regions. Worse, it even refuses to allow transformative projects to be developed, frustrating every step of the tortuous procurement process, meanwhile dancing their own favoured projects through the Government-supported gatekeepers.

Like the Celtic tiger before in which half the country did not fully participate, we will get the hangover, but we will not be at the party. I agree that many of the cost-of-living measures are needed, so I can vote for them. I will likely struggle to support the capital spending plans if they follow the previous and current directions of travel. I have raised these issues privately and publicly on the floor of this House with the Minister and Ministers of State at the Department of Finance, and with senior members of the Government.

Projects are concentrated in Dublin and Cork while the rest of the country starves. The data that are presented on the spending plans are an insult to our democracy and to the credibility of this House. In 2016, we were pinged by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD, for our lack of parliamentary oversight of spending. Despite the innovation of the Committee on Budgetary Oversight and the Parliamentary Budget Office, PBO, basic data on capital spending is not reported to this House. In fact, you often get more information from tweets by Ministers than from their statements before this House. Billions of euro are dropped into Departments and onwards, and on to a bunch of quangos like the HSE and Higher Education Authority, HEA, which all operate with black holes. The money is never seen or heard from again.

I will have to wait to see if there is any improvement, any fairness or any transparency in capital spending before I vote for these measures on a vote-by-vote basis. Overall, I cannot agree that this is the budget this country needs. I believe it breaks the fiscal rules and it certainly breaks, in my opinion, the spirit of fiduciary responsibility. It harms our credibility as a country, and it will likely feed inflation. Who knows what is around the corner for our small, open economy? What levers will be left to pull? Where will these levers be located? Based on the Government’s record of strategic infrastructure development to date, contemporary history tells me they will not be available in the Border, the midlands or the south east. That is more than a great shame.

See this speech in context