Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

It has been eight years. Fianna Fáil was in a confidence and supply arrangement with the then Government, which meant the latter only existed because of Fianna Fáil’s support. It is like this Government is trying to hypnotise the people of Ireland with shiny coins to make them forget what has happened over the past ten years. That is wrong.

The Finance Bill should have had four major objectives. It should have addressed the important issue of capacity within our infrastructure. The Government has ramped up cash inputs, but it has not focused on the reasons for infrastructure delivery grinding to a halt. It has not examined the waste that is happening. In housing, transport, health, energy and water, for example, this country is significantly underprovided for, yet the Finance Bill does not get to grips with this problem. It throws money at the issue, but the inflation rate for infrastructural projects has ballooned recently. The backdrop to the Bill is that we are getting less for far more money, yet the Bill does not deal with this issue.

Nor does the Bill deal with the capacity issue in public service provision, which is one of the main problems. Some 900,000 people are on hospital waiting lists and hundreds of thousands of people are leaving accident and emergency units every year without ever seeing a doctor because the units are so full. We have an incredible waiting list for practically every service - CAMHS, speech and language, autism, etc. The delivery of public services is grinding to a halt. Most of these services are dependent upon there being proper human resource capacity, but doctors, nurses and gardaí are voting with their feet and going to other countries. Australia is recruiting more gardaí than this Government is, believe it or not. That is an incredible situation. We do not have the proper pay, terms and conditions that would allow doctors, nurses and gardaí to live in the extremely expensive country that we have created, so many of them are having to leave.

For the provision of public services, we need proper workplace planning. This means we need to push the right number of students through universities so that we have enough graduates to staff the services we want to deliver. The majority of students on university medical courses are from outside the EU because they pay €150,000 for their degrees and the universities cannot finance themselves based solely on the money the Government is giving them. The universities are dependent on financing by foreign students. As a result, last year saw 700 doctors graduate in this country and 400 leave immediately. This is why people cannot get a GP. I know someone from the Minister of State’s constituency who rang 18 GPs in one day but still could not get on a list.

Incredibly, there is nothing in the Finance Bill that deals with the delivery of public services grinding to a halt. There is nothing in it that does anything about the issue of waste. The national children’s hospital has cost €2.25 billion and not a child in it. Some €300 million has been spent on metro north and not a shovel has been put in the ground.

There was €22 million spent on ventilators that never worked and 50 grand per year spent to keep them in a shed somewhere. Some 120 electric buses were ordered and never moved for a year and a half because somebody forgot to put in the application form for the charging points. That is not to mention the Gucci bicycle shed, the €1.4 million security hut or the €9 million for phone pouches. The phone pouches are another example of that Government waste. Little sleeping bags for phones for children while they are in school will be provided at a cost of €9 million. This Finance Bill was generated against the backdrop of enormous Government waste, yet it does not seek to reform public procurement or reform the massive level of administration and middle management we have in the HSE. That means we can keep flushing money - €25 billion - into the health service, but we are not going to get results on the other side.

I turn to the cost of living in the few seconds I have left. There is a three-card trick being played with the cost of living. The electricity credits given will be completely wiped out by the increases in the PSO levy and the carbon tax. Extra income is being given for childcare, but people cannot get childcare because childcare services are closing daily. I will leave it at that.

See this speech in context