Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I note the Minister of State's comments. The thrust of the Bill is anti-competitive. The thrust of the way in which the NTA was set up was anti-competitive. When the then Senator, Deputy Paschal Donohoe tried to raise a number of issues in this House, the debate was guillotined. The then President, Mary McAleese, was required to sign the legislation at short notice.

We allocated every penny of subsidy to a single company owned by the Department. There was no competition for the routes. All of the investment grants went to a single company. There was no competitive tendering for public services. This followed on from the Swords Express case in which the learned High Court judge, Mr. Justice Bryan McMahon, found that the Department of Transport had doubly discriminated - against the applicant, Swords Express, and in favour of CIE. The benefits of taxi deregulation are now being whittled away under this Bill.

The Department will be colonised and captured by producers. It will not devise competitive solutions unless the Parliament insists that it does. These solutions should be discussed. In Saturday's edition of The Irish Times it was reported that the Secretary General of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform had found that ¤30 million had been wasted on railway projects in the Dublin area by agencies under the aegis of the Minister of State's Department. It also found that ¤227 million of the money spent to date would be lost if projects did not go ahead.

I am trying to instil market discipline in the Department. It is ignoring the benefits. It has ignored the Goodbody report and High Court judgments throughout the Bill.

I was told that there was a consumer-oriented review group but apart from the Minister of State and the vice chairman, there were four producers, 11 people from the public sector, nobody from the private sector and a retired member of the Consumers' Association of Ireland. It seems the only issue on which the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport believes in competition is in opposing the Ryanair takeover of Aer Lingus. With everything else, issues must be nailed down and brought to court by the likes of Mr. Pat Nestor, who sought to open up the Dublin to Galway route. It is essential for the Parliament to make this Department work not in the interest of the bodies under its aegis but in the interests of the wider consumer.

This committee certainly did not achieve that and I am glad to clarify its membership. Competition is in the interest of consumer and it relates to the economies that the troika is telling us to achieve. This will not happen unless the people in Parliament want it to happen, which is why I have tabled the amendment. The Department will drift into its old ways of wasting money, as Mr. Robert Watt stated at the meeting of the Committee of Public Accounts last week, which will prevent competition. It is a most important amendment.