Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I also add my voice of congratulations to everybody in the Government, the agencies and civil servants involved over the past several days in preventing what was a bad situation for many people from becoming a nightmare. Much credit is due for this.

I second what Senator Craughwell and others have said about car insurance premia and how these affect young people.This is an issue I have brought up before. It is one to which we really need to return, particularly to consider the plight of younger people who have returned from abroad, perhaps having had to leave through no fault of their own. They are finding that their driving experience abroad is not being taken into account when premiums are being calculated. This is a source of serious concern and an issue we should discuss.

There has been a lot of talk about the Government's promotion, through the strategic communications unit, of Project Ireland. Much of the talk has focused on whether the lines were blurred between the giving of legitimate public information at taxpayers' expense and party political propaganda in which election candidates were featured and so on. I am disappointed that the best argument the Government seemed to come up with was that the other crowd had just been as bad in its day. That may well be true, but people should go back and look at the McKenna judgment and what it had to state about the use of taxpayers' money by the Government in promoting one side of the argument in a referendum. It should be learned that there is a spirit in the use of taxpayers' money. I am disappointed that the media have focused on whether the lines were blurred, not on the question of whether it was appropriate in the first place to spend millions of taxpayers' money to tell people about what the Government was proposing to do, which might or might not come to pass, and which the media would be in a position to cover. This is not about the seeking of submissions in advance of a report being produced or telling potential victims about sources of redress and that there is a place to which they should go. It is not about telling social welfare recipients what their entitlements are in the light of certain changes. That would certainly involve the legitimate spending of public money, but spending large amounts of public money to tell people about a grand plan, however good it is, is an abuse. It is a misuse of the booty of power by those who happen to be in power. All of the main parties stand accused of being flaithúlach with the people's money in a way that may be allowed technically but which still happens to benefit them in a way that is mainly political and which carries relatively very little benefit for the public. I would really appreciate a debate on the issue. Regardless of whether I am right or wrong, I am raising a legitimate issue about when it is appropriate to spend taxpayers' money and whether we have become too loose about the criteria under which we allow ourselves to spend taxpayers' money when in government. There is much to be commended in what the Government has done in recent years and I am sure there is much to be commended in the plan, but if the Government wants to subvent local media - I am all for this - it should do so directly. On doing so under the guise of telling people about projects, if there had been similar expenditure in promoting electronic voting, in retrospect, would we have considered it a good use of money? The answer to that question is clearly no. When there is something the public needs to know, by all means spend taxpayers' money, but when a Government is trying to tell it what it proposes to do in the future if it stays in office, frankly, that is spending that goes too far.