Fidelma Healy Eames (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome back colleagues.

It is good to be back and it is time to start working. Over recent weeks and during the next month, there has been and will be much speculation about the budget and its contents. People will be worried and so on, and for this reason I seek to have No. 26 on the Order Paper debated in the Chamber. It is my own Bill on reform of the budgetary process and is called the Ministers and Secretaries (Amendment) Bill 2014. This Bill has two key aims which are very simple, the first of which is that the Minister for Finance would lay one report before the Houses of the Oireachtas mid-year to lay out a clear plan and a clear account of the State's finances. The second aim, which is really important in view of the mess Members have seen with regard to health, is for each Minister to state his or her target outcomes and costings for the services and programmes he or she plans to deliver within his or her Department for the year in question. Had this been done, the fall-out experienced in respect of health would not have occurred, because the former Minister for Health, Deputy Reilly, would have been obliged to be accountable for the promises he made with a clear roadmap and costings. Moreover, they would have been agreed by the Cabinet but obviously this was never achieved.

I have been refused Government time on this Bill, which as a parliamentarian in this House I consider to be a terrible shame. As Senator Zappone noted, the schedule of work this week is quite slack and there is no reason this Bill could not have been on the Order of Business tomorrow afternoon, for example. Moreover, were a division on the Bill to arise, I would be more than happy for it to be postponed until another day. I ask the Leader to have a word with the Minister for Finance and his Department with a view to having this Bill debated before the budget. I will not push a vote today and will wait to hear from the Leader tomorrow. Were he to agree to this, I would be most grateful because it is important to consider better ways in which to undertake the budgetary process. Moreover, because of a European Union directive and the IMF, there is a requirement on the Government that at least 50% of what is in my Bill be implemented by it. The Minister, Deputy Noonan, agreed with me in this Chamber on that.