Aideen Hayden (Labour)

I find old habits die hard. It is quite interesting that the Fianna Fáil Party is lecturing the Labour Party on our spending priorities.

This Government has maintained its commitment to the capital investment group and we will spend €17 billion over the next five years. It is not a small amount of money and compares favourably with the proportion of GNP spent by our European colleagues, some of which are a lot wealthier than this country.

I welcome the Minister asking the House for its ideas. I am delighted the Government has prioritised the future needs of children and young people. Our most recent census of population clearly indicated that we, unlike many of our European neighbours, have robust population growth, which alone will make the Irish economy more sustainable in the future by ensuring we have a balanced representation of younger earners to older people in society. The growth in population will have to be funded and we have to make a financial commitment to it. This programme goes some way to doing that.

I welcome the commitment of the Government to the national children's hospital. It is an absolute disgrace that in all the years of the Celtic tiger, when we were incentivising construction in every field in the country, we did not manage to build a state-of-the-art children's hospital. It is incredible that it falls to this Government, in the middle of the deepest recession this country has ever faced, to have to complete the task the Fianna Fáil Party did not manage to achieve in 14 years. It is an absolute disgrace.

I also welcome the significant commitment of the Government to build primary and second level educational infrastructure. I regret we do not have the money to do more but I take Government's point that we have to put money in at the bottom. It is to be hoped we will be better off in a couple of years time and be able to all back on some ongoing projects in our third level institutions.

I have a suggestion which relates to the mistakes of the past. We have a difficulty in this country, due to the excessive cost of housing in the decades to 2007, in that many people were forced to live in the outer suburban commuter belts. People found themselves living in places like Gorey, which is the Minister's constituency, where the infrastructure simply did not match the growth in population.