Gerald Nash (Labour) | Oireachtas source

Senator Paddy Burke may be looking for divine inspiration. I welcome the Minister to the House and I am pleased to have an opportunity to discuss with him these two pressing matters for the State. As he knows only too well, from 2007 until the middle of this decade, the focus of the State was very much on the immediate viability of the country, economic recovery, getting people back to work and using the limited resources available to us to protect and promote public services to the best of our ability. The Minister will agree that all those who made the recovery possible, from businesses and the trade unions to the Administration in which he and I both served and the people of Ireland, deserve credit. The challenge we now face is to make choices on how best to use the resources available to us to expand the economy and create opportunities and invest in better and more public projects and services. These choices and challenges are much more appetising than those that faced any Administration in recent times.

The review of the capital programme and the Public Service Pay Commission report which forms the basis of the ongoing negotiations on a successor to the Lansdowne Road agreement will help to dictate the future direction of the country and the extent to which economic recovery can be felt in an equitable fashion across the country. The review is welcome. The 2016 to 2021 programme, Building on Recovery, set about the task of helping Ireland to recover from what many described as a lost decade of infrastructural investment. As the Minister noted, the programme involved a total backed capital investment of approximately €42 billion if we include the projects identified by semi-State bodies and public private partnerships.

There is now a consensus that the correct course of action is to do more by investing in projects that society and the economy need and to do so while market conditions are not only benign but very propitious. I can identify many such projects in my local area, as previous speakers did in their home areas. One with which the Minister will be familiar from a previous visit he made to Drogheda Port Company some years ago when he was Minister with responsibility for transport, is the Drogheda Port northern access route. This project is critical to the ongoing development of Drogheda which is, by some measure, the largest town in the country. This important infrastructural project is needed to relieve traffic from the medieval town centre and facilitate the swift movement of traffic from the port to the M1. While much of it will be funded by development contributions to allow residential and commercial development to take place in the northern environs of Drogheda, some State investment is also required.

The often neglected town of Ardee in mid-County Louth also requires investment for the N2 bypass. Anyone who has travelled through the town on a busy Friday evening will agree that it is one of the most difficult bottlenecks in the country. It is on the N2 national route and requires investment in a bypass to allow it to develop to its full potential.

More money would be available and we would be having a very different conversation today if the Government were to postpone the sale of part of the State shareholding in AIB. I am not prone to hyperbole - there is enough exaggeration and mock indignation in this House and the Lower House to last us all a lifetime - but the decision to dispose of approximately €3 billion worth of AIB shares owned by the Irish people for the purpose of making a very minor dent in our national debt is bizarre.