Joe O'Reilly (Fine Gael)

I welcome the Minister of State at the Department of Finance, Deputy Noel Ahern, to the House. The tragic backdrop to today's budget is the waste of the boom years. There is no improvement in services, traffic is in gridlock, class sizes are enormous in suburban schools and the health service is paralysed. We have created neither a fair society with the money earned in the boom nor a monetary war chest. We have failed in accountancy and social justice terms.

The Government has not achieved value for money. The budget failed to put in place a system to audit the delivery of services, monitor expenditure and evaluate results. There is still an opportunity to do this.

There should not be so many consultants, committees or the burgeoning industry around Government of advisers working in parallel to the Civil Service. It is bizarre to have parallel systems. When Members were at school, the cream of the country entered the Civil Service and went on to be junior executive officers, administrative officers and first secretaries. Why must a plethora of outside consultants sideline them? Not doing so would save a significant sum of money.

It is a crime that the Government has increased the number of its external agencies to 630. This is a bizarre, Byzantine and monstrous bureaucracy that needs dismantling. More reprehensible is the fact that the Government created the illusion of a boom for the general election. Now we are in deficit. The illusion was kept alive until the general election was over. We are now borrowing for current expenditure which is what we did in the bad old days.