Paul Bradford (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak on this important legislation. I welcome the Minister to the House and thank him for being here, especially as it is such a busy time for him and his Department. I wish him well in his ongoing negotiations vis-à-vis securing certainty and sanity regarding our public sector pay bill.

I am sure the Minister has listened to the debate with interest. I did not read the transcripts of the debate in the Lower House but I suspect, in the tradition of that House, that the debate was more of a Government versus Opposition, black versus white, yes versus no type argument. We have had a very balanced debate here this afternoon and if we lived in a democracy where voting in the Oireachtas was done by way of secret ballot, we might be a little uneasy about the outcome of the Second Stage vote.

I wish to comment first on the matter of the national children's hospital. It must be accepted as an absolute given that every Member of both Houses of the Oireachtas and every citizen of this State wants that hospital to be built as soon as possible. That is not what the debate is about. One could say, 80 or 90 years after the McGrath family brought about the building of hospitals by the sale of Irish Hospitals' Sweepstake tickets, the country has not travelled very far economically, politically or socially if the building of the new children's hospital is now dependent on the sale of national lottery tickets. It is regrettable that we have not been able to use our resources, our taxes and our politics in a more advantageous manner in recent decades. We are now being asked to use the licensing system for the national lottery to generate funding for the hospital. If that has to be the way, then so be it.

Very pertinent issues have been raised in today's Second Stage debate and hopefully we will be able to deal with them in more detail on Committee Stage. In the days of yore it was said that the Roman Catholic Church sold indulgences in order to build cathedrals. In the era of the British establishment it was said that peerages and seats in the House of Lords were sold to fund naval and army advances and we are doing something similar here in order to build a necessary piece of social and health infrastructure. In that context, we must ask ourselves where it all went wrong.

We talk about thinking outside the box but we are not really doing so. There is a vast amount of unused and under-used financial resources in this country. We have very high levels of savings here but are not able to incentivise people to put their money to more constructive use. There is an enormous amount of legally-held Irish money in onshore and, particularly, in offshore accounts overseas. Should we not look afresh at encouraging some of that money back into this country, particularly for the development of social infrastructure?

In the immediate aftermath of the general election, the country was in a state of economic confusion, chaos and fear and every citizen understood that we were in a national emergency situation. There was a willingness among all sectors of society to think differently and to respond differently, with generosity. Politically, we did not take advantage of those few weeks and months to take major, daring, new and different steps. We are still doing more or less the same as has been done over the past 15 or 20 years. New and fresh thinking are required, even at this late stage.

Regarding the legislation before us, I look forward to the Minister of State's Second Stage reply and I am sure he will be able to justify what he feels needs to be done. However, we must listen to what our colleagues are saying in this House. Those of us in government must listen to what those in opposition are saying regarding the need to guard, in whatever way we can, a resource of the State. Senator Hayden's point about the possibility of differentiating between this State asset and other State assets such as Coillte was interesting. Nonetheless, the national lottery is a State resource and cannot be dismissed lightly. Senator Tom Sheahan posed a question about value for money. Given that the profits to be made over a ten or 15-year period will be very substantial, is it appropriate that we would lease, sell or transfer this asset for the price of the profits that will accumulate over two or three years? These are important issues and I hope the Minister's mind is not fully closed. We must have a substantive Committee Stage debate and go through these very important issues thoroughly.

The broader debate about the funding of necessary national projects such as our hospital building programme will have to be conducted elsewhere. We should be moving beyond the days of the sweepstake tickets. What was appropriate and necessary in the Ireland of the 1930s and 1940s should be left to those times. We should be able to fund necessary projects in different ways today.

I wish the Minister well in his deliberations and hope he will take on board the generally supportive views of my colleagues, as well as the concerns and questions raised.