Eoghan Harris (Independent)

While the Minister of State, Deputy Martin Mansergh, has made a manful attempt to put a good gloss on the budget, he has been unable to make it better than it is. I wish I could support the budget or the Opposition's criticism of it but I can do neither because both sides failed to deal with its core failure, namely, the failure to reform the public sector. The Irish Times cut to the chase this morning when it described this as the central failure of the budget and stated it was beyond comprehension that in a time of crisis in the public finances a Minister would kick public sector reform into the long grass.

It was not the Minister for Finance, Deputy Brian Lenihan, who did this. He has had many calls in recent times and must not have had any sleep because the dead hand of the Civil Service is all over the budget. I will give three examples, ranging from minor to major. First, if civil and public servants are being asked voluntarily to give up 10% of their salaries, by virtue of the same voluntary principle, why are medical card holders not being allowed voluntarily to give up their medical cards?

Second, we have been informed that the pain is spread equally across society. It is a palpable lie to pretend that people in permanent pensionable jobs will endure the same pain during the recession, however long it lasts, as those employed in the private sector. I spent 20 years in the public sector and 18 years in the private sector and there is no comparison between them. Life is hard, cruel and difficult in the private sector.

This brings me to the third problem. Although the private sector is the one that is not looked after in the budget, it is that sector which alone creates wealth and jobs. The public sector creates many fine things and gives us many great services, not least the Office of Public Works which comes under the remit of the Minister of State's Department. We have had great civil servants. Dr. TK Whitaker was one such civil servant who delivered us from the bane of the Civil Service which had crushed Irish creativity for so long, as was pointed out by Tom Garvin. However, the current generation of civil servants shows no signs of such creativity and the number of them increases all the time. Mr. Dermot Gleeson pointed out in Killarney last weekend that public sector numbers have grown by 30% since 2000. That is 30 new public servants for every 100 in the sector.

I wish I could support the Opposition but yesterday I did not hear any central criticism from Fine Gael, the Labour Party, the Green Party or Sinn Féin of the core issue of the need for public sector reform. Why is that the case? This is where an Independent Senator comes into his or her own. It is because every party in this country is petrified of the public sector and of the political consequences of taking it on and dealing with it. This is because the public servants are the real rulers of this country. It is a case of public sector rules okay, but it is not okay.

Because of the dead hand of the Civil Service, we did not get the budget we needed. What we needed was a business budget of tax cuts to allow private sector entrepreneurs and workers to spend, consume and create jobs and we needed spending cuts in the public sector — it would not have mattered whether such redundancies would have been voluntary or compulsory — to finance a business budget. We did not need a "sit on your butts" budget, as it were, which is what we got from the Civil Service mandarins who drew this up. I cannot believe the Minister, Deputy Brian Lenihan, was completely wide awake when he rubber-stamped this to allow it to go through. I have huge respect for him but this is a deadly budget rather than a dynamic one. It is a book-keeper's budget, not a business one. It is not a budget to bring us out of the decline in the economy.

I have heard nothing coherent from the Opposition in the way of criticism of the budget, except for Deputy Ruairí Quinn who had the courage to point out the public sector-private sector apartheid that is growing. He called for solidarity between public and private sector workers. I heard nothing from the Labour Party or Fine Gael. I did not even hear a criticism from Fine Gael of the medical card proposal from the point of view of the exorbitant fees paid to doctors. Why do its members not demand a cut in the doctors' fees?

I wish I could support this budget or say I could support a coherent Opposition criticism of it, but the central issue, the need for reform of the public service and the need for investment and a dynamic private sector, has not been confronted.