Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State and he always has our good wishes in the reforms he is trying to implement. In response to the speech of the Minister of State, we have some growth but GNP was down 2.5% in 2011. The domestic economy remains in trouble, as the Minister of State knows. He also referred to tax receipts having increased by 6.3% in the year end to October. It may be higher as the months progress but that is raising extra taxation out of a flat economy. It is a problem I have with the strategy in the April 2011 IMF statement. We are in the process of raising taxation from ¤34 billion to ¤44 billion and current expenditure is reducing from ¤49 billion to ¤48 billion. Virtually all of the adjustment is being done on the tax side and current expenditure has increased this year. No newspaper believes it and their headlines would be redundant if they actually read the numbers. The so-called cutbacks are counterbalanced in other areas of Government activity by expenditure increases but all of the burden is being borne on the tax side. That has created all sorts of problems in retail and tourism because that is how the economy is adjusting. More should be done on the expenditure side, a point I will address presently.

Reforms are needed in government. The Wright report was critical that only 7% of the staff in the Department of Finance had qualifications in economics. Mr. Wright comes from Canada, where the proportion is 60%. The Government needs a Government economic service, with economists in the spending Departments as well as in the Department of Finance. When spending Ministers speak in the Chamber, it is rather obvious they do not evaluate alternatives. Each Department tries to maximise its budget rather than deliver measures of outputs where we could judge whether programme A is good at poverty alleviation and is achieving its goals. We must tackle that problem and we need proper public expenditure appraisal.

On the capital side, the Minister of State mentioned some projects but the danger with infrastructure is that we end up with empty roads, empty airports, empty hotels and empty houses. There was an edifice complex in capital expenditure in this country in the past. I propose a central office of project evaluation, publishing evaluations in advance and allowing people to evaluate them over the course of a year.

Ireland has a strong culture of political lobbying, which reflects the structure of public expenditure. Lobbyists will be at the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform tomorrow and a large number of submissions would spend the imaginary surplus if there was any danger we will ever have a surplus. No one is addressing the problem that the country is living far beyond its means and has developed an entitlement culture that has exhausted not just the taxable capacity of the country but also our borrowing capacity. We have a bureaucracy problem. An bord snip noted that the number of senior civil servants expanded far more rapidly than the number of civil servants as a whole. Bureaucracy maximises its own budget. We also have a lobbyist problem, which we must get a grip on because it will bankrupt the country again.

We also have a moral hazard problem in that most of the people who caused the crisis from 2008-10 are still walking around enlarging their incomes. The Government must face up to that problem. I love moral hazard being described by bankers as people who cannot afford a mortgage. Bankers are the greatest exhibits of moral hazard. They took ¤64 billion out of the Exchequer, which is not bad work for one evening. We will not take any lectures from bankers, or IBEC more widely, about the dangers of moral hazard. Bankers are the illustration of regulatory capture. We have far too many useless regulators. Senator Healy Eames mentioned energy. All of the regulators are captured by the producers and do not act in the public interest. I will not trod on the patience of the Cathaoirleach anymore. Anything this side of the House can do, we will be delighted to do. The Minister of State has an important national task.