Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

-----but should it always be negative? I cannot recall when I last heard a positive sound come from the Opposition. I am aware the job of Opposition is difficult at any time. In the bad times it was difficult because there was no money in the country so nobody could complain about anything. However, it is no harm to step outside the box, to use the current phrase, and examine the situation in which we find ourselves. We should be grateful that we are where we are now and that we do not have to beg for money. We do not have the IMF around the corner, we do not have it above in Government Buildings and we do not have it making decisions. We were a programme country and let us not forget it. The Opposition needs to think about that. We were a programme country so we were allowed to spend what the IMF thought it was wise to. It was here for quite a long time - the guts of five years - and it left the criteria behind it. That is something that is forgotten regularly in this House. In speeches it is no harm now and again to give a little bit of credit to the efforts made by the Government and previous governments towards recovering while at the same time trying to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow. Those challenges will continue well into the future.

It is a measure of government at any time to be able to anticipate the pitfalls and be able to deal with them insofar as we can. Everybody talks about the windfall taxes. Everybody is reaching for the fruit to fall from the tree, but it does not come that easily, as the Ceann Comhairle and I know well. Accordingly, what we must plan for now and in future is stability. We must plan for the event of things going wrong. The European courts decided we were due a great windfall, but it was not really meant for us in the first place. It was meant to dissuade foreign direct investors from coming into this country. That is what it was meant to do and that is the way it was phrased and structured. That will not happen again; I can assure the House of that. We can do what we want and say what we like, but we must keep in mind that was an obstacle in our path. Incidentally, as I have said before in the House, there was a concerted campaign across the globe. It was amazing how this country, a small country, featured so much on their agenda. Mo Ibrahim, a multimillionaire, led a campaign around the world. Along with a well-known charity, he went around the globe campaigning against Ireland and saying how awful it was that we had a tax haven here and so on and so forth. He did not tell people there were equal tax havens all over the globe and in Europe as well. He was campaigning on his own behalf of course, on the basis that he was in favour of international aid and contributing to it, but it was to be aid for trade. Thus there was a barb in it, so if people traded in African countries and other less developed countries and if there was trade for his company or the companies he controlled, he would consider aiding them in a way that had a tag on it. There was no aid at all. It was just trade for trade. We just need to remember that.

I wish to defuse another argument that everything the State puts its hand to is wrong and that it fails, overspends and overreaches. The children’s hospital is used as an example. I happen to have been lucky or unlucky enough to be on the relevant committee at the time it was initiated and went through all the debate that took place around it. There never was an original costing done - that is a fact - because there was no quantity surveyor’s report and it could not have been done because it was a two-stage contract and there was another one below ground and another one above ground. Nothing happened, but people began to give guesstimates, small guesstimates of less than €1 million and so on and so forth. If that can be accepted, everything is an overrun after that. We will not build a hospital of that size, scale and complicated nature for less than is going to be the ultimate price. If we want a smaller one, by all means let us have a smaller one, but if we want to have the present one we have to pay for it. We also need to recognise that in the course of doing so building costs have accelerated over the past number of years. In housebuilding alone there has been an increase of 33% in the past two to three years or whatever it is and we all know about that. We have people saying of the hospital that as builders they could build it for less. There are 6,000 consultation rooms in it. We are aware of how complicated the building of 6,000 houses is, in the market alone, and if somebody is suggesting there would be no overruns in the same period in the building of 6,000 houses I can listen to that, but I am not prepared to believe it.

The Irish Fiscal Advisory Council made an unfortunate intervention in the sense that it gave a byword to the Opposition.

I am always conscious of the need for the Opposition to have bywords, catch phrases, throwaway remarks and that store needs to be built up at all times. I am happy about that. However, I do not think it is the job of the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council to do that. It is right to draw attention to the fact it is dangerous to over-inflate the economy but inflation has come down. It has been either below or at 2% in the last 12 months. A lot of other countries in the eurozone and throughout Europe generally have been trying to do just that and have not been successful. The Government has managed to do that, albeit there have been other inflationary trends in our economy because of a whole series of things such as wars, Covid and all the things contributed to that. We have to deal with the issues that arise as they arise and we cannot be selective. There is no sense in the Government running away from the hard questions and saying it will deal with them another day.

The Government has done an admirable job. It is a good budget. We got a lot of criticism because it makes direct once-off payments. There is a reason for that. It is not a recurring payment. In terms of the economy, which the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council is primarily concerned about, it should recognise and note that. We also need to remember that for the stability of the economy in the future, comparing it to 2007 was not a good idea. The Opposition must have been glowing with delight when it heard the phrase but it was not a good idea and it raises a question mark. The Irish Fiscal Advisory Council has to do its job and in certain circumstances where adequate provision is not being made its criticism is valid and needs to be taken into account. I think the Government has kept all of these issues in mind.

I will not go through the various benefits spoken about by many in this House over the last week other than to say it was a very helpful budget. In response to the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, there is such a thing as social cohesion that has to be borne in mind, particularly in Europe today, where large groups of people are being challenged by the so-called moving towards the right and that the right is the future, and so on. It is not. We were there before and it was not such a nice place to be. It was not as a result of anything we did in this country but it was a really awful place to be. If we have not learned enough from the experience of the 1930s and 1940s at this stage then we have a problem. There are still those around who say things such as that the Holocaust never happened. Imagine saying that the Holocaust never happened. Thousands after thousands of people were just exterminated.

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