Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with Deputies Shanahan and Verona Murphy.

I move amendment No. 1 to amendment No. 1:

To delete all the words after "recognising that" and substitute the following: "there is a need for the Government to commit to protecting the public purse, seek value for the citizen and implement accountability to ensure that there is a cost to high ranking civil servants or Government Ministers wherever there is an incident of unjustifiable waste of taxpayers' money.".

I want to talk about public expenditure. Listening to Deputy Barry, there is an attitude that when money is wasted, it is wasted by a contractor, builder or whatever. When you look at some of the issues, and I have looked at them carefully, such as the modular homes, I think it is specification and an overindulgence by designers. The bicycle shelter here is an overindulgence in design. I do not think the particular bicycle shelter is actually functional. The children's hospital has gone the same way. It is an overindulgence in design, leaving us with a beautiful building that costs a huge amount of money, whereas we could have built a simpler form of building for a cheaper price and it still would have been functional for what we need it for. When a child is sick, the child needs to be in comfort. The child does not want to have a curved building in which he or she can recover; the child just needs a simple, functional building.

I will raise a few examples with the Minister of State. In Tuam, we built we the Joe and Helen O'Toole community nursing home - when I say we, I mean the taxpayer - for €17 million. It opened last year. A local trust put €7 million toward the €17 million for this 50-bed, state-of-the-art nursing unit. In their wisdom, the designers decided to put a roof garden on the top of it. There is now an issue with HIQA because of that. Twelve months later, 25 beds in the community nursing unit are not yet registered with HIQA. That is a waste of money. An X-ray facility has gone into the primary care centre in Tuam. It opened this year, after funding was first secured for it in 2017. One HSE official said they were putting the patient first. Today, a person will wait three months to get an X-ray there because a member of staff is on maternity leave and there is no plan to replace her. This is the kind of daftness we have. We have a children's disability network team, CDNT, in the refurbished old hospital in Tuam for children with disabilities. Half of it is for the children's disability unit. However, it is only half-staffed. That is a waste of money. The buildings are fine and the investment is good, but we do not have the follow-through to make sure we get the optimum value and outcome from the buildings we have. As a quantity surveyor, I look at that and ask where this goes wrong. If this were in the private sector, where I worked for more than 30 years, heads would roll. Heads do not seem to roll here, which is why Deputy Tóibín and I have tabled an amendment to the Government amendment. We want to see accountability, not just accountability in terms of yap, talk and reports, but there has to be a cost if senior people make decisions, and it costs the taxpayer more money. We can talk all we like and fill all the papers with all the news we like, but there has to be consequences to the actions every one of us takes. That includes the people who make decisions about spending taxpayers' money unwisely or wasting it. I would like to think that is where we would go with this discussion, rather than just having political point scoring. It is important we understand that this is not our money. This is taxpayers' money, and we have a responsibility.

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