Matt Shanahan (Waterford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The bust following the Celtic tiger era should have taught many of us the importance of budgeting and living within our means. This applies also to the management of our national finances. I said on budget day that I felt I needed to stand up and question the wisdom of breaking the fiscal rules in developing budget 2024, not least when the level of pre-windfall corporation tax means that in real terms we are operating a deficit. We adopted the fiscal rules precisely to try to avoid the mistakes of the past and to avoid the pain and trauma of boom and bust.

I have a patchy memory of the mistakes of the late 1970s, but I certainly recall the pain of the 1980s. Like many, I was perhaps irrationally exuberant during the 2000s, but having seen the horror of the global financial crisis cutting our country to ribbons post the Celtic tiger, the austerity programme and the bailout, we should never risk going back to those times. The question is whether we have learned that economic indiscipline in the good times causes deep social and cultural carnage when times go bad. No Minister for Finance should sit down to write their budget without first reading Jean-Claude Trichet's letters to Brian Lenihan. They are sobering in the extreme and show that the kindness of neighbours extends only so far, even in the case of our European ones.

Of course, we need to address the pressures to deliver on health, housing, infrastructure and climate obligations, but every Department and every part of government is getting a bump in this budget, as they always do. We are yet again giving out participation awards without any connection to performance, reform or greater financial probity or transparency. We speak of delivery, but the people cannot see it. We could redeploy areas of government and our public service that no longer make sense in the context of the full employment that now exists, but we choose not to.

We speak to pressing needs, but we seem unable to understand the conditions that precipitate them. Indeed, we look to advisory bodies we have endorsed for macro and microeconomic advice. The Irish Government Economic and Evaluation Service does some good work but has no political cover. We lauded the fact we had developed the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, but the Government then chooses to ignore its advice completely. We have shown no commitment to the delivery of real spending reform or no root-and-branch spending reviews. They are commonplace in commercial business but they are not here in commercial politics. We never clean out the house or do the serious reforms needed and we continue to fail to meet the public's demand for better services and greater efficiencies.

We can look at the children's hospital as a textbook example of dysfunctional procurement at a stratospheric level. It is Ceaușescu-esque on every level, including the gigantic failure of procurement, oversight and governance. Responsibility for such dysfunction is never called out. The root-and-branch reform of our civil and public service administration remains a job for someone else to do at a later stage, when those with responsibility now are in the clear. We can look to the slow strangulation of Sláintecare, forgetting that the people were promised universal healthcare in 2011. In 2017, Sláintecare was presented as a genuine, all-party effort to renew and reform healthcare, but even before the pandemic it looked as though it had been dumped in favour of grandiose and, to the most delusional, trophy projects.

We have pleased the Dublin and Cork health industries by pressing ahead while other regions have been visibly left to starve. Six years later, the only answer to our woeful health system is to throw money at it or else turn off the tap, creating further system failure and further dysfunction. We have the data to tell us where we have spent money; we never seem to have them to tell us where we have wasted it. In fact, we have no reasonable data on which to base decisions and it appears many in the Departments like it that way. Budget 2024 throws more money at problems than we have done in a decade, without any progress. If we cannot produce a sustainable budget when we have surpluses and full employment, when can we? The time to fix the roof is when the sun is shining. Despite all the headwinds and the mixed signals, the Government coffers are full, which means the sun is shining now.

Of course, however, as the Minister of State well knows, I can say this. I can emphasise the importance of keeping Government spending under control, because I am from Waterford, where we have to practise that at every juncture. The south east, the midlands and the Border region are not fully at this national spending frenzy. GDP continues to fall behind in these regions. Indeed, Deputy Harkin outlined during Leaders' Questions earlier her sincere concerns at the regional disparity effected in the north west and the Border area.

There is a massive deficit in new, high quality, knowledge economy jobs in these regions. These are usually Industrial Development Authority, IDA, supported jobs. The kicker is that the Government refuses to undertake transformative capital projects in these regions. Worse, it refuses to even allow transformative projects to be developed, frustrating every step of the tortuous process. It is meanwhile dancing its own favourite projects through management consultants and others. Like the Celtic Tiger before, in which half of the country did not fully participate, the south-east will certainly get the hangover, but will not be at the party. I agree that many of the cost of living measures in the budget were needed. I will likely struggle to support the capital spending plans if they follow the previous direction of travel, and the clear discrimination evident against regional priorities outside of the east and south west. I have repeatedly raised these issues with Government, both privately and on the floor of this House. Projects are concentrated in counties Dublin and Cork while the rest of the country starves. The data presented on the spending plans are an insult to our democracy and to the credibility of this House. In 2016, the OECD rebuked Ireland and this parliament for our lack of parliamentary oversight of spending. Despite the innovation of the Select Committee on Budgetary Oversight and the Parliamentary Budget Office, basic data on capital spending are not reported to this House. The social media pages of Ministers are often more informative than their statements to this House. Literally billions are dropped into Departments and onwards, into a bunch of quangos like the HSE and the HEA, which operate as black holes. The money is never seen or heard from again. I will wait and see what improvement, if any, can be evidenced in terms of fairness and transparency on capital spending and the national development plan review before I decide how to vote on the Finance Bill.

As I have already said, I cannot agree that the 2024 budget was the budget the country needed. I believe it breaks the fiscal rules and certainly the spirit of fiduciary responsibility, and have said so. I believe it harms our credibility as a country and will likely feed inflation. Who knows what is around the corner for a small open economy like ours as corporation tax receipts decline? We used to blame stamp duty as the reason we lost our way in the Celtic Tiger. Will windfall corporation tax become the future explainer for how a country, and a government failed to learn its lessons?

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