Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

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

To delete all words after "notes that:" and substitute the following:

"— there needs to be a disciplinary process for senior civil servants for instances of repeated waste of public funds;

— accountability needs to be written into the contracts of senior civil servants; and

— there should be a Minister of State for Accountability, nominated and located within the Department of the Taoiseach, to track live procurement and infrastructural projects to ensure they do not go over budget and are delivered on time, to report to the Taoiseach on a weekly basis in terms of accountability.".

I thank Independent Ireland for bringing forward this motion. Waste in government has been a major issue for Aontú in recent years. Waste and the lack of Government accountability is one of the most important issues facing the Dáil over the last five to ten years. There is no doubt. Aontú has made it our goal to cut Government waste and to create efficiency in the delivery of public services and public infrastructure. We will not stop until we achieve that.

This is one of the most useless and inefficient Governments in the history of the State in terms of minding the public purse. It is a Government that is allergic to accountability. The Minister for Finance talks about accountability. The Government does not know what accountability means. It thinks accountability is that the Minister comes in here and speaks in measured tones and shock about the latest example of millions of euro lost in an investment or it may even have a committee meeting to look into it and then it moves on to the next situation. That is not accountability. If we continue on this route we will continue to wake up morning after morning to the latest iteration of Government waste and millions or billions of euro.

To show the incompetency of this Government, we are 100 days after the election. Where are the committees? No committees have yet been formed in this Legislature. All week we are having statements on housing, health and justice. We are putting in the time because the Legislature cannot even legislate. We cannot bring legislation through the Dáil given the incompetency of the Government. The democratic legislation system is grinding to a halt. The first responsibility of this Government, to legislate for the country, is not happening at the moment because 100 days after the election we cannot even get it together. I could easily spend the next ten minutes rhyming off all the examples of Government waste from the Gucci bicycle shed to the National Children’s Hospital and the Government spending €2.5 billion on compensation for mistakes that happened in hospitals over the last ten years. There is a never-ending supply of this. Unfortunately, there is not even enough embarrassment on Government faces over these issues to make a change. It is having a significant effect on Irish society in several ways. First, the Government is incinerating billions of euro of taxpayers' money. A large portion of the taxes the Government takes from the men and women who get up early in the morning and burst themselves, who commute two and three hours a day and work hard to get home to their families and spend half an hour with their kids before they go to bed are being incinerated by the Government in terms of waste.

The other aspect of Government incompetency and uselessness is how so many infrastructural projects are grinding to a halt. The National Children’s Hospital was meant to be open in 2020 at a cost of €700 million, save an asteroid hitting the planet. So said Leo Varadkar. This Government has proved to be more damaging than even an asteroid hitting the planet because here we are in 2025 without even a date for the opening of that children’s hospital and the cost is heading towards €2.5 billion.

I will tell the Minister what accountability is, if he will just listen and stop looking at his mobile phone for two seconds. Accountability happens in the real world. There are hundreds of thousands of people who work in the tens of thousands of small businesses around the country. If they do not do their jobs properly and reach a standard or if they continue to waste money or have a situation where they burn through their business’s money, there will be a cost to them. That cost might be a disciplinary procedure, moving sideways or a lack of promotion or it could be losing their job. However, nobody ever loses their job at the top ends of the Civil Service no matter how much money they lose and nothing will change until that changes.

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