Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister, as always. When she comes to this House everybody is stimulated by what she has to say to us. We are looking at starting out with a new public service looking after the preschool group in a much more systematic way than we did previously. We are trying to do it from the perspective of a country that is broke. I think it was in articles in the Sunday Business Post last Sunday that some people wrote that the public servants should take the Croke Park offer because they were getting way more wages than they would get in Germany. That is part of the background to the problems we face. Through social partnership we have designed an extremely expensive public sector in terms of providing services. That makes me cautious about embarking on another round. We doubled the number of staff in the health service between 1985 and 2009 from 55,000 to 110,000 and the best efforts of the Minister, Deputy Howlin, have brought the number back to 103,000. We must ask what on earth was happening with all that extra employment. We hear dreadful numbers about the cost of children in care and so on raised at meetings of the Committee of Public Accounts.

We have an extremely large number of people extremely highly-paid by international standards, making it difficult for us to tackle urgent problems such as the one under discussion this afternoon. Being in favour of public expenditure may mean we end up with more highly-paid public servants. On page 12 of the an bord snip nua report, it says the biggest increase has been at managerial and higher management level, with higher management levels in the public service growing by 82% in the period 1997 to 2009 when Civil Service numbers as a whole increased by 27%. I get too much correspondence from deputy and area regional managers and too little from people on the ground helping in the tasks the Minister has illustrated.

Where would we get the money to pay for the proposal before us? The other volume of the report examines special needs assistants, which went from 6,000 in 2004 and 2005 to 10,500 in 2009. The budget grew from ¤130 million to ¤350 million. Has anyone evaluated what was supposed to be happening? Was it making life easier for teachers or were the results? Are there any private sector firms in Ireland that employ 10,500 people? We must ask these kinds of awkward questions and it does not mean the people asking the questions have formed a dislike of children or poor people. They are just asking when this huge expenditure will bring results.

When we say we would like to shift child benefit, as per the Mangan report, more towards services we must ask what kind of services these are and what they would do. We have a high level of cash transfers and the reasons there appear to be less results is the higher proportion of children in Ireland in jobless households. I appreciate the Minister's studies of Scandinavia. Dan O'Brien wrote an article about it and I know the Minister for Social Protection, Deputy Burton, is also concerned about it. In the boom, we moved people from being potentially workers into the disability and invalidity categories in massive numbers. Does that do children any favours? There is some of that bias in the Mangan report in the way the lobby groups and the submissions were highly critical of the family income supplement. What I like about it is that it gets resources to people who are working. Work is the eventual solution. I was concerned at the material in page 28 of the report, where they model the two-tier proposal. Two thirds of parents on family income supplement would lose between ¤1 and ¤100 and less than 20% would gain between ¤1 and ¤50. That seems an ill-advised route. If we are to discredit cash as a means of helping low-income people, let us not do it in a way that disadvantages low-income workers. Let us ensure the cash is turned into the benefits the Minister seeks and the Senators across the floor seek rather than more layers of bureaucracy.

What happened when we recruited an extra 4,500 special needs assistants in schools in a four-year period? It must be one of the biggest recruitment programmes ever and I never hear it being evaluated. There is no pot of gold and we cannot come into the House and say that, if there was a surplus in the budget, this is what we would like to spend it on. There is no surplus. We have spent a lot of money and we are bad at evaluating outcomes. I agree with what Senator Van Turnhout described as the academic parts of the paper. There seems to be conclusive evidence that early intervention is good. If one was a devil's advocate or a contrarian, does that mean we should stop spending money on postdoctoral fellowships? If people are still in university in their 30s, they might have grown up by that stage and we might like to give it to the three year olds about whom the Minister has been speaking.