Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister. While this Bill is something of a housekeeping exercise, it is nonetheless important that we are having some class of parliamentary debate on it. The Minister will recall it was not that long ago when we did not have debates of this nature on the annual Appropriation Bill. It simply went through on the nod, sadly, a little like our Supplementary Estimates this year. I will return to that matter shortly. As the Minister says, this Bill provides the legal authority for all 2023 expenditure and the Revised Estimates and Supplementary Estimates of this year. As the Minister said in his contribution, it allows for spending to take place on important public services in 2023 and before the 2024 Estimates are approved. That is important. It would be good, even though it is not necessarily the subject of this debate, to have copies in sight of the Revised Estimates at this point. That has not happened. I understand they will be made available this week. The Taoiseach made reference in the Chamber earlier to the fact that additional resources would be made available to the health service, especially for new medicines. That is to be welcomed.

As the Minister knows well, it is constitutionally one of the key jobs of the Dáil to approve proposed government expenditure. It is not a job, quite frankly, that the Dáil does especially well, not because it does not want to but because it is simply not enabled to because of the reality of how politics and government are practised in this country. The Dáil is a rubber-stamping chamber for decisions already made by the Executive in the full knowledge that funding allocations will always be approved as presented and with no amendment. The Minister will be familiar with the 2018 OECD report, which ranked Ireland 61st out of 70 countries when it comes to parliamentary engagement in the budgetary process. In that review, the think tank expressed a view that there is almost no revision of budget proposals by the Legislature and said it would be difficult to view this reality as "beneficial for fiscal democracy". I agree. It is a fact that one of the most important things we do every year as TDs is vote on government spending. The creation and distribution of resources is fundamental to politics and parliamentary democracy. It is extraordinary that we still have little meaningful and well-informed scrutiny of the details of our budgets and funding allocations to Departments, outside of the fairly cursory examination joint committees do with their analysis of spending in their line Departments.

Nothing we do impacts on the lives of the people we represent more than how we plan to allocate their hard-earned resource. Yet there is incredibly little interest in the process and very few voices calling for real reform and greater parliamentary functions in budgeting, as set against what might be described as the overweening power of the Executive. We have had some improvements in the budgetary oversight and scrutiny process in recent years, with the creation of the budgetary oversight committee, the Parliamentary Budget Office and, arguably, the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council.

I say all of this in the context of the damaging farce that is the process to agree an Estimate for the Department of Health for 2024. Strictly speaking, we are discussing resources for this year, but the same applies to the fictional budget allocated to the Department for last year. There are patients paying the price today for the inadequacy of that budget. There is no point going into all the details as they were well ventilated and interrogated in this House and in committees over the past few weeks. However, the overall point is worth making. I do not use the word "farce" lightly, especially when the price of underbudgeting our health service, which has been routinely the case for many years, will be paid, and is being paid today, by sick and vulnerable citizens. The process has been a farce from start to finish. We have heard all the bellyaching by the Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Green Party TDs who gave their imprimatur to the health Estimates. The same people will be populating our airwaves over the next few weeks and months, when the impact of the health budget really starts to hit home.

I do not want to personalise this in any way but if there is blame or, more appropriately, responsibility to be allocated and apportioned, then it is the Minister, Deputy Donnelly, who should own it. As I have noted before in the House, it could be said that the fundamental job a Minister has to do is provide a reasonable working Estimate that can be approved and secured for his Department and agencies for the year ahead. The Minister, Deputy Donnelly, could not and did not do that. Rather than get on with the job, he started to get his excuses in first by doing the rounds of the studios saying he and the HSE cannot work with the allocation he had secured. In any other western European democracy, especially where parliamentary oversight is effective and is seen to really matter, the Minister would be fetching his coat or, if he could not find his coat, the parliament would find it for him. Principally and most importantly, all of us who depend on a functioning and fit health service will suffer through stretched or non-existent services and recruitment embargoes that are, in effect, already in place. It was referenced earlier by another Deputy on the Order of Business that Fórsa members are in dispute with the HSE at the moment because of a recruitment embargo that was implemented last autumn, well before the new situation in which the HSE finds itself. That is having a real impact on the delivery of health services in our country. There is a lack of accountability and transparency around how we do budgets and the function of this Parliament in that regard. It is a question of trust, credibility and accountability. If Ministers are providing fictitious budgets that they know in their hearts are simply not up to the job of delivering a decent service to the people we represent, then that is very serious indeed.

Also very serious was IFAC's stinging critique of budget 2024, which it issued just a few days ago. In IFAC's ten years or so in existence, this has to be the most damning indictment and critique it has made of any budget. Its criticism is relevant to this year as well and, strictly speaking, we are discussing resources this year and into early next year. The council refers to the ongoing three-card trick of using the gimmickry, as it describes it, of core and non-core spending. The latter is increasingly starting to look like permanent spending. The responsible thing to do would be to account for and record that spending responsibly and appropriately. IFAC's report is so scathing that it demands a detailed and formal response from the Minister for Finance, not merely a defensive opinion piece in a Sunday newspaper. We all read the Minister's defensive article in the Business Postthis week. IFAC really has shown its teeth and alarm bells should be ringing in the Government. The council's evidence is quite striking and needs to be taken seriously. It demands a detailed response from the Minister.

Society demands a practical fiscal and economic response from the Government, considering what the country has gone through in recent years. There is absolutely no doubt about that. Governments' multiplicity of priorities and the balancing act they need to perform are very different from the very strict agenda and strict responsibilities of IFAC. However, the poorly targeted nature of this year's decisions and, indeed, one could argue, the decisions taken last year and the year before that, are becoming much more apparent. We know the biggest issue the State and its citizens have been facing is the cost-of-living crisis. As a result of those poorly targeted responses, the kinds of tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the better-off, including wheezes like the energy credit that applies universally regardless of means or income, are having the effect of keeping inflation higher for longer. As we know, the people impacted most by that are those on low and modest incomes, who will require interventions from the State again next year because of the actions by the Government this year and last year. That will mean keeping inflation at an elevated level for far longer than ought to be the case, at cross-purposes with the ECB approach in terms of interest rates. That is the impact of the way the Government has used the only tool available to it to control inflation. The criticism by IFAC needs to be taken more seriously than any other of its critiques have been taken in the past. It is a damning critique. It must be taken on board and it demands more than an opinion piece response from the Minister for Finance. It demands a detailed response and the Minister should publish that response.

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