Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State. Obviously this legislation is primarily to confirm, in statutory form, what has been agreed by Dáil Éireann in financial resolutions and, therefore, there is very little we can do or say about it, except to say that these measures are generally intended to mitigate and alleviate some of the particular hardships being endured by business, consumers and farmers, arising out of the financial disturbances we are currently experiencing.

I will say a couple of things about the overall financial position. We have got to the position that we are running very substantial budgetary surpluses based, in large measure on increased receipts of corporation tax. I see many newspaper articles saying this is artificial and should not be relied on in the long term. It could be a short-term phenomenon in that it might, in the coming years, dissipate to some extent due to international conditions. However, I have not heard anybody who has been sceptical about the fact that these moneys are coming in suggesting that we should not have them. I have not heard anybody who is critical, on some kind of quasi-guilty conscience basis, of Ireland's success in attracting foreign direct investment to this country, saying it is a bad thing and we would be better off without it. Maybe People Before Profit or some group like that would be of that view but, in general terms, most balanced middle-of-the-road people would take the view it is a good thing that we have this surplus. The question is what we do with this.

Inflation is high at present and we hope the rate is reducing. We cannot be oblivious to the effect of increased public expenditure in an already slightly overheated market, if these moneys were to be spent on current expenditure. It raises the question as to what we should with these surplus tax receipts. It occurred to me that one could put them away and perhaps they should be put away in a rainy day fund. Others have suggested we should apply them to the reduction of indebtedness, simply by paying off national debt, which is at €224 billion at this stage.

One of the reflections I have had is that the high rate of inflation in Europe, the sterling area and the United States means that, in effect, the real value of our national indebtedness will reduce.This is because the currency in which it is denominated is devaluing, and inflation is, in effect, a stealth tax of its own.

However, if we are to expend any of those funds, they should be spent on projects that are worthwhile and of long-term capital value. There are so many possibilities for such capital projects available to us at the moment, that I would urge the Government to do two things. The first thing is to face up to a fact that, I think, the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, has at last acknowledged, namely, that it is one thing to announce a policy and it is an entirely different thing to get the policy to come into effect. I refer to offshore wind generation, the amount of expenditure that is going to have to be put into national electricity grids, port services for offshore wind energy development and issues like that. There is a clear case for a careful application of the moneys we have on worthwhile projects.

I want to make a couple of points. In this capital city, we are now about to embark on two projects, one of which is to dig a tunnel from Dublin Airport to near where I live in Ranelagh. It started off with a price tag of around €3 billion. I wrote an article in The Irish Timessaying that it would probably end up at €4.5 billion. I now see that it is somewhere between €15 billion and €20 billion, and rising I am sure.

We should have asked ourselves, somebody should have asked the citizens of Dublin, and there should have been some public debate as to whether all of that money would have been better spent on a very light rail, Luas-type system, covering far more of the Dublin metropolitan area. I am talking about Dún Laoghaire, for example, and all the suburbs that are, at the moment, dependent on different means of getting about but chiefly by private cars.

Another thing I wanted to say in that context is that we are about to spend a vast sum of money on BusConnects. I do not know how much we are going to spend on it, but I have been looking at the recently-announced Transport for Ireland website, and the amount of actual infrastructural work that is going to be carried out on the roads is huge. I am unhappy that this represents good value for money. We have allowed the engineers out there with their toy bus sets and toy train sets and we could have done far better.

Having said all that, I re-emphasise my view that we need two things from this Government, namely, value for money on capital expenditure and the capacity to deliver on capital projects. Somebody said to me recently that the Irish Free State Government established in 1922 managed to build Ardnacrusha at a time when this country was on its knees in the period after the Civil War. They added that if this project was put forward now, by the time we got over the environmental arguments and went to the Four Courts, backwards and forwards, we would still be at the planning stage.

There is an absolute imperative on the Government to get its act together on the delivery of capital projects. It is not just good enough to say that it will put aside €200 million for this, or €100 million for that. That is not the way to do it. For instance, I notice that more funding is going to be made available to local authorities to refurbish derelict and run-down housing. If one went into any local authority and put that money in a suitcase in front of the county chief executive and said, "Here is your money", what is he or she to do with that money, if that authority does not have the officers, the architects or the people who can work out value for money?Simply announcing something in Dublin does not mean a derelict cottage in County Clare will be actually approved for an improvement grant by the local authority. We must face up to the fact that there is a huge difference between delivery on one hand and announcing funding on the other.