Jim Higgins (Fine Gael)

I welcome the Minister of State. The convention is that the Appropriation Bill is nodded through the Dáil and debated in the Seanad, but a debate is needed this year more than ever on the state of the public finances and the expenditure of public funds over the past 12 months. That is the reason I am glad we have a brief opportunity to debate the legislation. It should have been entitled the Misappropriation Bill, 2002, because the economic performance of the Government and its predecessor is ample testimony to the misappropriation of public funds in recent years.

Last year's Bill appropriated a sum of £25,855,285,000 and while this year's will appropriate €29,341,108,000. This represents a whopping increase of €3,486 million or 5% on last year's figure. Last year in his Budget Statement the Minister for Finance, Deputy McCreevy, acknowledged that current spending during his terms of office had increased by 79%. What an admission from a Minister who on taking office stated there would be a rigid cap on public expenditure, an increase of not more than 2% above inflation, yet after five years expenditure had increased by 79%.

Instead of acknowledging that his target was not valid, the Minister made absolutely no apology for the massive escalation in the expenditure of public finances and, instead of putting on the brakes, he indulged in a reckless spending spree, squandering a €4.8 billion surplus and plunging us into deficit budgeting, like the old days. However, 2001 was an election year and it was a case of power at all costs, irrespective of what damage would be done to the public finances.

This was done by a Minister who earned universal praise in the late 1970s and early 1980s for courageously standing up to the then Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, following his famous belt tightening television address to the nation in which he preached the need for fiscal rectitude and so on. Mr. Haughey was taken on by the Minister, then a Government backbencher, and told this could not happen. He won universal praise but what a shameless capitulation and betrayal by the Minister who set out his stall last week as a pioneer of fiscal rectitude.