Fergal Browne (Fine Gael)

I welcome the Minister and his officials to the House. I am deputising for Senator John Paul Phelan who cannot be here today and will do my best to represent the party. I took notes during the Minister's speech about different areas on which I will disagree with him. While I am not an economist I understand that a Minister for Finance controls only spending. He or she hopes revenue will come in and has some influence on it by setting the tax rate. Recent figures have proven that this Government has overcharged its customers and underspent by €700 million on public services. That might be good in a business but in a Government it is shocking as it means it is not delivering services to the taxpayer.

I cannot understand why Ministers, when given their allocation of funding, do not continuously undertake reviews. For example, last year Deputy Paul McGrath showed the Department of Education and Science had underspent on the school building programme. Every day in this House there are matters on the Adjournment regarding schools awaiting funding. I have proposed a matter today regarding a school in Carlow that has been awaiting funding for five or six years. Some schools get the funding but do not spend it. In that case other schools should be fast tracked ahead of them. There is no excuse for money not being spent. If it is allocated, the service should be forced to use it, and if not it should be reallocated to another service.

The Health Service Executive has spent capital funding on current expenditure. There will be a statement on it in the Dáil this afternoon. It is a cause of concern to the taxpayer. When the capital funding of €564 million was announced last July, Carlow and Kilkenny, including St. Luke's Hospital in Kilkenny, got nothing. I raised it in the House at the time.

At Cabinet level, St. Luke's has been mentioned as an example of how a hospital should be run. There are no patients on trolleys and the hospital uses its limited resources very effectively. It has a very poor accident and emergency department but a minor injuries unit has been established. However, the staff and patients of the hospital got a slap in the face by getting no funding. That was rectified when, by pure coincidence, the Tánaiste had to visit the hospital the next day, which was a cause of major embarrassment. Thankfully, she provided some funding for the hospital last year and she guaranteed more funding this year. I will pursue this issue again to make sure that St. Luke's is not the victim of this overspend by the HSE. The hospital should not bear the brunt of this mistake.

We are all concerned about public spending. The Government has underspent by €700 million in some areas, yet there has been overspending on projects like the Dublin Port tunnel where, according to newspaper reports, the contractors are seeking an additional €400 million. We have been told that the roofs are caving in and must be fixed. I appreciate that infrastructural projects are not easy to manage and I am pleased that road projects are now coming in on time and on budget. However, some of our projects are way behind schedule. It is embarrassing that we do not have a metro that serves Dublin Airport. In any other major city, one can travel from the airport to the city centre by metro, but one cannot do it here. On the metro systems of Paris, London or New York, photographs will be displayed of immigrants who built them, many of whom were Irish. Yet in our country, we do not have an underground system at all, or even the planning for one.

I was critical of the stamp duty provisions in the recent budget. Stamp duty explained some of the increased revenue this year, due to the increased sales of houses. It is grossly unfair that stamp duty rates were not altered. I do not have much sympathy for those who have four or five properties, but two out of every five properties currently purchased are being bought by investors. That means that the person starting off is struggling to get on the ladder. There was opportunity in the budget for the Minister to change the stamp duty rates. People who have a family home and who want to trade up to a bigger second-hand home are also hit by stamp duty. A case should be made to exempt them as it is only logical that people trade up to a bigger home over time.

The Minister's late father was involved in politics in the 1980s. If he was here now and saw the amount of money available, he would be amazed. No one could have predicted the huge economic growth in the country in the past years. We have all collectively failed to plan adequately. A few years ago people would have been delighted with just a job, even more so if their spouses also had jobs. Unfortunately, there are downsides to this. People need two jobs to pay off a huge mortgage. They need to move out of their own area to afford a house. The Minister's constituency is like my own as there are now many people who commute to Dublin, some of them from Senator Brady's constituency. They ultimately do not want to live there, but they have no choice as they cannot afford a house in Dublin.