Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Fáiltím roimh an deis píosa cainte a dhéanamh faoin mBille seo atá thar a bheith tábhachtach. I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Bill. I put an effort into understanding it, because we are dealing with massive figures and different terminology and finance, which is not my area but over the years here I have learned to take notes. I thank the Library and Research Service staff for their hard work and the fool's guide to legislation that they prepare for us on a regular basis and under extreme pressure.

The Bill comprises six Parts with 37 sections and two Schedules. We are talking about a fund of €100 billion in the foreseeable future. Is it not a joyful story that we are finally seeing sense to put aside money so that we will never see this country stuck in the manner that we have on a number of occasions in the past? Yet, I find myself agreeing with Deputy Nash, who said that the fund has been framed in a negative way. It certainly has been. Let us start with the elderly. I have a particular interest in this as I get older that we are now labelling older people as a societal problem rather than it being a delight that people are living longer, contributing to society and actually saving money. That is not put in here at all. We are looking at a sovereign fund which should make me jump for joy because we have all heard about the sovereign fund in Norway that was put in place with its oil revenue. However, this sovereign fund gives me great concern. For simplicity, and the people in the future who might look at this and wonder what is all about, it is important to set out the major points. We are setting up two fund, the first of which is the future Ireland fund. This will be made up of 0.8% of GDP every year until 2035 or 2036 and that fund cannot be touched until after 2041. It has been pointed out by various colleagues on this side of the House that the GDP, which we all learned off my heart and learned what it meant, is not very reliable at all. It gives a misleading picture of how successful Ireland is because of the distortion caused by foreign direct investment but that metric is going to be used here. Nobody has explained this to us. The Minister has not explained to us how we are now reliant on that.

The other fund is the infrastructure, climate and nature fund, into which €2 billion will go every year, plus the amount that comes from the existing fund that is going to be dissolved. We will have €2 billion every year, so we will have €4 billion after the first year. That will continue until 2026 and then some of that can be drawn down. When I look at it, my difficulty with all of this is that it is set out in such restricted way. First, the money is being invested for maximum return. It is not necessarily the right way to use public money for maximum return with no guarantee that any amount of it will be invested in the country. Then we will be dependent on timing. If the country needs that money, it will all depend on how it is invested and where it can be drawn down.

There are two funds, ostensibly to help the Government in the future cope with difficulties with expenditure if it does not have enough money to spend because of a downturn in the economy. The first one requires 0.8% of GDP every year, regardless. The second one requires €2 billion every year, regardless, being put away. Then, access to that is through two ways. One is for general expenditure and the other for the climate and nature fund. Some 25% can be taken out for general expenditure and up to 22.5%, a lesser figure, for climate and nature. We get lost in all these figures and I ask myself: what is this all about and why can I not agree with this when it is a wonderful idea to save? Any mother, any sensible woman at home tries to put a few bob aside because she knows the importance of saving.

However, we are doing the saving in a particular way at a particular time when we should be spending and not leaving enough flexibility to be able to access the funding in the next ten years when it is needed. Yesterday, I pointed out that there were 71 people on trolleys in hospitals in Galway. I do not think there is anyone present who does not know someone who has spent time on a trolley. Members of my family have. It is an obscenity that anyone has to spend any time on a trolley. Not alone is it an obscenity, but we know from repeated evidence from consultants that, at a minimum, between 330 and 350 people die prematurely every year, which is directly related to the time spent on trolleys. Health has been described as a hole for money. I do not use words like that. Health is a basic human right, like housing. How did we get to this situation? I have had the privilege of sitting on a health forum for ten years of my life and I witnessed the systematic running down of the public health system from 2006 to 2016. It started with the PD-led Government that knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. That is when the commodification of our health service really went into overdrive. At the same time, in parallel with that, the Government channelled the money and our solutions into private medicine. I was a member of Galway City Council when we rezoned land for the building of a private hospital. The argument put forward was that 20% of the beds would be reserved for public beds. They magically disappeared, of course, as soon as the rezoning was done by majority vote. We could get lost in the anecdotes I am telling except there is a point to them. It was the commodification of health and housing. This is being brought to an absolute pitch with the HAP scheme, which costs most than €1 billion when it is included with the rental accommodation and long term leasing schemes.

Here we are with these two funds and we are tying them to GDP and obtaining the maximum return and putting the emphasis on spending, albeit capital spending, but it is not entirely clear. In addition, we are linking it with the national debt. I am no expert on debt, but it is completely fite fuaite. The use of the money seems to be entwined with the annualised cost of servicing the national debt.

Carbon credits have not been excluded. This money could be used for us to purchase our way out of obligations. During pre-legislative scrutiny, the question of whether this money could be used for carbon credits was raised. We were told that the argument did not arise in respect of the first fund because that does not become effective until 2041, so we do not need to worry our little heads about that. After 2041, God knows who will be here but they can worry about whether the money is used for carbon purchase. On the second fund, we were reassured that the infrastructure climate and nature fund was not intended to be used as carbon credits. There is no policy or no guarantees at all on the matter. These are meaningless words really given there will be different governments and different priorities.

Then we look at the human rights and where the money is going to be invested. I look back a question I asked courtesy of my office, which did a lot of work on it in relation to the report, Irish Business and Human Rights: A snapshot of large firms operating in Ireland, published by Trinity College Dublin in January 2024. I looked at the work by Professor Mary Lawlor, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders and that of the Irish Coalition for Business and Human rights, ICBHR. I looked at all them in the context of how we will ensure that the billions of euro of public money being put aside will not be used by companies that have little regard for human rights. I do not see the phrase "human rights" mentioned anywhere in the documents before me and I have read all of them. Environmental, social and governance issues are mentioned. That is pathetic. Having spent four years of my life on the Committee for Public Accounts, I saw governance of the entities that came before us, including the universities, that one would not expect to see anywhere. We have seen the fruits of that in the last weeks in the University of Limerick. I see environment, social and governance, but I do not see any mention of human rights. I do not see spelled out is what we should not invest in. Let us consider the Trinity College report from January of this year.

Over half of the 50 largest companies in the Irish economy scored 30% or less on corporate uptake of the UN guiding principles on business and human rights. Where did they come from? They came from a UN framework that embeds the "Protect, Respect, and Remedy" principles. There are 31 guiding principles and the human rights council endorsed them in 2011. To date, 32 states have taken them up, including Ireland. Ireland was very good and launched its first action plan in 2017. That plan has been out of date for three years and there is no sign of a new plan. There is no sign of a new plan in relation to our obligations and whether we are going to continue protecting, respecting and remedying under the 31 guiding principles. On the tenth anniversary of these principles in 2021, the UN working group on business and human rights said that uptake "needs to move more widely into the mainstream of the business community".

The report I referred to is a snapshot of large firms operating in Ireland. It was published this year and runs to 45 pages. It examined the implementation of the UN guiding principles on business and human rights of the 50 largest companies in Ireland. Separately, but parallel to that, the authors looked at the next ten largest State-owned enterprises in this country. Three measurements or themes were used: governance and policy commitments; embedding respect for human rights; and conducting human rights diligence and grievance mechanisms. The report found that 86% of the companies scored less than 50% of the available marks. While 88% of the companies made explicit commitments to human rights, specific commitments to workers' rights were more limited. A full 28% of the companies scored no points. Deputy Ó Murchú said earlier that he could go on and I too could go on but I will try to limit my comments, given the time I have left. Companies with their domicile or headquarters in Ireland performed, on average, less well than the sample as a whole. State-owned enterprises fared very poorly, with five of such enterprises in this country scoring less than one point out of a possible 24. Coillte, CIÉ, Dublin Airport Authority, and EirGrid all scored zero points. The IHREC commented on the need to take action. The action plan ran out in 2020 and there is no sign of a new one. What am I saying about all of this? The words that are being used here - "environment", "social" and "governance" - are pathetic, given that background and that failure to embed human rights. An Oireachtas Library Service briefing points out the position in relation to the Irish Strategic Investment Fund and the NTMA, which is over that fund. During the recent committee discussion on the Illegal Israeli Settlements Divestment Bill on 20 March this year, Mr. Nick Ashmore, director of ISIF, advised that the NTMA has engaged multiple external investment firms to manage the different parts of its portfolio. It is probably a wise decision to get different firms involved and I have no difficulty with that. ISIF currently holds investments in companies included on the human rights council database of business enterprises involved in certain activities related to illegal Israeli settlements in Palestine. The fund announced that it would be divesting of €2.95 million and that was positive but there remains €10 million invested in companies that are on the UN database.

I would have thought we would be seriously interested in learning from a pandemic and from the climate catastrophe that is just around the corner. We declared a climate emergency back in 2019, not led by this House but led by children and concerned people on the ground. They forced us into declaring an emergency. We should learn from that emergency and from Covid. What do we do with this wonderful opportunity of a sovereign fund and windfall money as a result of taxes from the corporate sector? If we take Covid, we were in a mess for many reasons but one of the main ones was that we had utterly failed to resource our public health system. We have still utterly failed to resource it on a regional and county basis so that people can learn to trust public health officials in the event of a new Covid or a new epidemic.

In relation to climate change, we are doing things in a piecemeal fashion with no transformative change. We should be using these sovereign funds in a different way. Yes, we should put aside the funds but we need access to them now, in the immediate future, and in the longer term to bring transformative change. My worry, having read all of this, is that we are proceeding to follow the very same model that led to the catastrophe in relation to climate change and the financial disaster that deeply affected ordinary people on the ground but not the more privileged classes. I would have thought, in my ignorance, which I am slowly trying to get rid of as I learn more of this language, that we would invest or make it a condition that we invest in our own country, and that we would invest with safe returns rather than entering the market. There is a need to enter the market but it must be done in a balanced way. It must be balanced by Government policy. If 71 people were on trolleys in Galway hospitals yesterday and that is repeated all over the country, there is something seriously wrong. I get and send emails on a daily basis where I appeal, like all Deputies, on behalf of people who are on the housing waiting list for 20 years in Galway city. They have been forgotten. Such is the crisis with homelessness and other pressures on staff that people are waiting 20 years to be housed. If we come back from 20 years to 15 years, I can genuinely tell the Minister that I am getting replies telling me the staff have no idea when these people can be housed. With a financial brain, one would say there is something wrong here; we need to do something. We need to finance the local authorities. We need to provide them with staff, expertise and money to build public housing on public land. We are not doing that. The last direct-build public authority house in Galway was built in 2009. We did not build another house until 2020 or 2021, under pressure. We have an ongoing task force in Galway that is not fit for purpose and has become another bureaucratic layer. It should be asking how much land is in Galway, how much of it is public, how many houses we can build on it and a whole range of measures but none of that is happening.

Similarly, on hospitals, what infrastructure is necessary now and in the next ten years and how can this sovereign fund deliver on that? I see none of that here and while I agree in principle that it is a very good idea to have a sovereign fund, this is anything but a sovereign fund. This is putting money aside to deal with the economic downturn that will happen because we are refusing to make our country less dependent on the outside world in terms of energy sufficiency and having communities on board - we are not doing that - adequate housing, adequate health and public education. That is what makes a society and a republic and that is what the sovereign funds should be used for.

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