Pat Casey (Fianna Fail)
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The debate follows the normal pattern. The Minister will have six minutes, group spokespeople will have seven minutes and all other Senators will have three minutes. I call the Minister.

Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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This is the Appropriation Bill for 2024. It is very much a technical Bill. It is worth emphasising that before this legislation gets to the Oireachtas, all the different Estimates that constitute the very large amount of money provided for in this Bill have been debated by the relevant Oireachtas committees. All of the different provisions in relation to the availability of money have already received scrutiny at Oireachtas committee level. In relation to the Bill itself, it provides for the budgetary framework. It has within it provision for an amount of nearly €86.5 billion in net terms. This represents the ongoing investment in our public services through the efforts we make to plan and implement our budget policy. It contains the funding needed from a capital perspective to allow us to build more homes and schools, and to deliver the transport and water systems needed and other important parts of vital infrastructure. From a current perspective, it contains the funding needed to deliver improvements in our social welfare system for a wide variety of people on different income supports as well as additional targeted supports for families and people on illness, disability and carer programmes and the change of €12 in core weekly social welfare rates. Investment in our health service is also provided. This investment plays a critical role in improving our ability to recover from important health conditions and funds the activity needed to lead to an improvement in the number of people on waiting lists. It contains funding for schools, the delivery of homes and additional apprenticeship schemes, the funding to support our national childcare scheme and the funding needed to deliver the pay increases that form part of the public service agreement between 2024 and 2026. We have seen a gradual lessening of the impact inflation is having on living standards. However, we know prices are still very high for many. That is why there is further support provided to households and families in cost-of-living measures. These measures are included in the Appropriation Bill.

The second key function of the Bill is to provide a legal basis for public spending to continue into 2025. The enactment of this Bill before the end of December provides the authority for spending in January 2025 until approval of the 2025 Estimates by the Dáil. This authority as contained in the Central Fund (Permanent Provisions) Act 1965 is based on the amounts provided for in the Appropriation Bill 2024 in front of us now. This ensures payment can be made at the start of the year in respect of social welfare payments, pay for important public services as well as supports needed for children and childcare.

From a capital perspective, under the rolling multiannual capital envelopes introduced nearly 20 years ago, Departments may carry certain unspent capital funding over from the current year to the following year up to a maximum of 10% of the voted capital allocation. This Bill provides for a capital carryover from 2024 into 2025. The current value of that is €207 million. This represents 1.6% of the total Exchequer capital programme of €13 billion for 2024. The Appropriation Bill also includes a provision to advance funding from the Central Fund to the Paymaster General's supply account to facilitate payments due in the initial days of January next year.This provision ensures that the funds are in place for salary, pension and social welfare payments at the start of the year without creating an overdraft on the supply account.

Section 3 provides for up to €900 million to be advanced, with this then being repaid to the Central Fund next January. This provision arises as certain Exchequer liabilities and social welfare payments are due for payment by electronic funds transferred in the initial days of January 2025. With the banking system closed on 1 January, funding will need to be in place in departmental bank accounts before the end of this year to meet these liabilities in a timely way. In addition, An Post needs to be prefunded before the end of the year in order that it can distribute funds to its network of post offices throughout the country in respect of social welfare payments it makes on an agency basis. These Exchequer liabilities form part of the supply services for 2025 and these costs will come under moneys voted in 2025, in respect of which the usual processes and mechanisms for voted moneys will apply.

This Bill is an essential element of the financial housekeeping that Members of both Houses of the Oireachtas are required to undertake. It will authorise in law all the expenditure in 2024 on the basis of the Estimates passed by the Dáil during the year. It will ensure that the payments funded through voted expenditure will continue to be made in the period between the beginning of January 2025 and when the Dáil approves the Estimates in 2025. I commend the Bill to the House.

Seán Kyne (Fine Gael)
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The Minister is welcome. This is important legislation to ensure the funding next year of the State’s public administration and the various services funded by each Department, including the Department of Health, and each agency, including the HSE, in addition to all our social welfare programmes. It is important that there be certainty regarding the Estimates. Both Houses have a role in this regard of course.

I acknowledge all the work done up and down the country by our civil servants, including those at the front line during the Covid pandemic, which saw changes that resulted in many people working from home. Now we have a blended-working programme within our civil and public services, and that must be acknowledged also. Front-line staff have gone through so much. I include gardaí, who have faced difficult challenges in recent times, and other staff who put their lives at risk every day to keep us safe as a society.

As I did last year, I want to touch briefly on one item, namely Vote 29, which pertains to the salaries and expenses of the Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications and offices under his remit, including Inland Fisheries Ireland, which I have raised here on numerous occasions. This will be my last opportunity to raise it. I ask that Inland Fisheries Ireland’s board and chair publish the RSM Ireland report, which is being kept secret and hidden. The report is on issues concerning Inland Fisheries Ireland and relates to a protected disclosure I and other Oireachtas Members made. It has been finalised and is with the board. However, despite my being a complainant, along with others, I have not been provided with the final report. That is not good enough. It is right and proper that a report like this, containing what are effectively the results on an investigation that has taken place, not be kept secret. Who is the secrecy protecting and what information is contained in the report? The board and its chair know this information but have not provided it. Again, I must put on record my concerns pertaining to this. I certainly hope the chair and board of Inland Fisheries Ireland publish the RSM report. If I am lucky enough to be back in this House or the other on the next occasion, I will certainly continue to raise this because I believe it is in the public interest.

Aidan Davitt (Fianna Fail)
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I will not delay the Minister for long. This Bill, based on our budget, is key legislation to ensure all promises will come to fruition. It is very prudent and appropriate at this time to reflect on the good work that has been done by the Government over the past while and, in particular, the array of forms of assistance that have been provided to those who are not so lucky in life, from carers to the unemployed. What the Government has done over the past five years is very commendable. I welcome the budget and the appropriation that is following it, whereby the money will be distributed.

I will not delay the House any longer. On this day, I am sure that the Minister would love to be out canvassing with Senator Kyne and other Members of this House.

Michael McDowell (Independent)
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The role of this House in financial matters is limited but one of the things we are supposed to do is approve the Appropriation Bill every year. It is 47 years since I walked into Leinster House for the first time. That is a frightening thought for me personally.

Aidan Davitt (Fianna Fail)
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I had not been born.

Michael McDowell (Independent)
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Senator Davitt was not even born. The €90 billion that is the subject matter of this appropriation is colossal compared with what we were dealing with in the hard-pressed days of the 1980s, when this country was in very poor order indeed. Sometimes we ask whether we have made progress, and there are many critics of the State, but we should remember that in the 1980s there was mass emigration and colossal taxation, and the State ran virtually everything that moved, did not move or did not move fast enough, including transport, communications, insurance companies, shipping companies, energy production and broadcasting. The transformation in our living standards has been dramatic. Sometimes I wish that some social commentary would actually give us some marks for the changes that have taken place, whereby a country that was in a hopeless state in the 1980s has reversed its fortunes and done so well. With events in America, I have no doubt there are more challenges coming down the line, but I emphasise that we live in a very different world from the one that obtained at the beginning of my parliamentary life.

There is one thing in particular that I want to mention to the Minister. In Schedule 1, there is an allocation of €7.9 billion for the Office of the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth. Not all of this money relates to those seeking asylum, but a considerable portion does. I have always eschewed the politics of being negative on immigration per se because, to go back to the debate we had earlier on paying people a living wage, the people who are not getting the living wage are, for the most part, immigrants. Let us remember that. The immigrants run so many vital aspects of our lives. This country’s expanding population is driven in large part by immigration, and our health services and a series of aspects of our lives depend on it. We should be positive about that. However, there is a conflation of asylum seeking and regulated immigration. We have to have a society that understands that immigration should be controlled, directed and in the interest not merely of the receiving state but also immigrants themselves.I regard it as a probability – I hope to God I am right on this - that the Minister will be at the Cabinet table in the months and years to come. The time has come for the European Union, not Ireland on its own because it cannot do it by itself, to revisit the conventions and those two pillars of the present law in respect of asylum seeking. I mention this because, within the European Union, the Schengen free travel area is collapsing. The CDU in Germany is now saying it has to revisit the matter of asylum seeking. Even the Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, is saying that this is no longer sustainable. We wrote the right to asylum seeking into the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. It has its own paragraph, or couple of paragraphs, which gives the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg the right to impose on member states the manner in which they deal with this problem. It has not been a success. If we are going to be stuck with the EU asserting a competence in this area, it should be bold enough to reassess the fundamental cornerstones of asylum seeking and to distinguish between mass migration on the one hand and controlled immigration on the other hand. If we do not do that, we are in trouble. What I am really saying to the Minister is that the expenditure in this area, however many billions of euro it is, amounts to the fifth-largest departmental expenditure. It is a huge departmental expenditure, which exceeds that of all sorts of other Departments that people might think are very important.

With regard to those funds and whether we can sustain asylum seeking in its current model into the future, the Government must be honest with the people. Not only must the Government say there is a problem, it must be committed to working with other member states of the European Union, not through the recent migration pact, which will not deal with the issue, but on the fundamentals. If the Christian Democratic Union in Germany have come to the conclusion, like many other European parliamentarians, that the fundamentals of the 1951 Refugee Convention have to be revisited, we should support that. We should be willing to say we support that and not be afraid of doing so, while at the same time holding the line that migrants into Ireland who come here lawfully and have played such an important role in Ireland are to be respected and their rights to be upheld. This is something that, over the next ten years, is going to cause increasing damage to Europe for want of political courage on the part of our parliamentarians.

Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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I thank Senators Davitt, McDowell and Kyne for the points they have raised. Senator Kyne re-emphasised the issues he has concerning Inland Fisheries Ireland, which he has raised persistently in Seanad Éireann. I will again ensure the issues he has raised are passed on to the Minister for agriculture because I am aware that this is an issue with which he has been concerned over many years. I am not adequately briefed this afternoon, however, to be able to give him a perspective on that report and where it stands at the moment with the board of Inland Fisheries Ireland.

Senator Davitt made a point about the desire of the Government and the State to help those who are not so lucky in life. One of the issues this Government has been attentive to in recent years is a recognition of what a sharp increase in inflation can do to living standards across our country. We have been acutely sensitive to what that means for those who have the least. While there are always debates, in which I am involved, regarding the level of support that should be made available, we ignore at our peril what high inflation can do to people's standards of living and their willingness to support a normal approach to running an economy. The different measures we have introduced in recent years to deal with inflation have been important and valuable. I hope that when inflation falls back to more normal levels we will be in a position to support living standards in more normal ways, such as through taxation and normal social welfare increases. This aspect, however, is a big feature of the Appropriation Bill and Senator Davitt’s point is a really important one.

Senator McDowell made a point about how things have evolved since the 1980s. Looking at the evolution that has happened in Ireland, even from the later point of the 1990s, it is now a fact that many of the jobs for which my generation would have had to leave Ireland are available here in Dublin. Whenever a point like this is being made, however, it must be accompanied with an important recognition that there are still many people who need additional support. There are many for whom a story of national progress can ring hollow. There are many who have not had the opportunity to participate in the progress that has happened on a national level. God knows, we have many issues today in areas such as the lack of housing and the adequacy of public services. Overall, however, we have to make the case that there has been a huge economic transformation in this country. There have been many ups and downs but, in general, the arc has been upwards. There are those who will describe this country in very different ways, and these moments will be particularly acute in the next few weeks. I will be saying that while of course we have great difficulties, we still have made progress and can make progress in the future.

As for Senator McDowell’s point on migration, I will register the points he has made. I noted at the start of his contribution that he has been at pains to outline the benefits migration brings and the reality that without migration our public services and our national wealth would be diminished from where they are at the moment. The points the Senator made regarding the operation of EU law in this area are matters on which the Minister for Justice is better equipped to respond than I am. I have little doubt that under the next Government, these issues will continue to be of urgency and will require further consideration. I hope a colleague of mine, a former finance minister of Austria, will be ratified as the EU Commissioner for Migration and Home Affairs. That role includes responsibility for all these matters. I know really important decisions will be made in this area in the years ahead. It will fall to the next Oireachtas to consider and debate this matter further.

I thank the Senators for their co-operation on the Bill. As I said in my opening remarks, these very large amounts of money have been scrutinised through the relevant Oireachtas committees. I am always conscious that when we get to this point in the parliamentary year we ask for the co-operation of both Houses to facilitate the passage of this legislation. I thank Senators for that. As this will definitely be my final opportunity to address the House, I thank all Members for their co-operation and constructive engagement and for the differing views they have offered in the years in which I have come before to this Seanad. I genuinely wish all Senators the best of luck in their political choices and elections in the time ahead. We all have a very busy number of weeks coming up, but it is a valuable price to pay for the importance of democratic elections that are fairly held and vigorously contested.

Aidan Davitt (Fianna Fail)
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Hear, hear.

Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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I wish all Senators good luck. I also acknowledge and thank the staff of the Oireachtas for all the work they do and for their co-operation with me and my office.

Pat Casey (Fianna Fail)
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I thank the Minister for making himself available to the House and wish him the very best of luck in the upcoming election.

Pat Casey (Fianna Fail)
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When is it proposed to take Committee Stage?

Aidan Davitt (Fianna Fail)
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Now.

Pat Casey (Fianna Fail)
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Is that agreed? Agreed.