Before lunch I had begun my speech by surprising the Minister for Education and a couple of his colleagues on those benches by saying that in a way — but that is a very important qualification — I had been surprised by the hostile reception this budget had encountered. I said it was perfectly true that the budget had done nothing for industry except intensify the burdens resting on it; that it had done next to nothing for agriculture; that it had failed to provide any kind of radical solution, or the prospect of a radical approach, to the very serious problems obtaining, the two most serious our economy faces, namely, the state of industrial relations on the one hand and, on the other, the appalling millstone represented on the State by public service pay. None of those items had benefited or shown any improvement as a result of the budget, and that has to be said. Leaving that aside, the average punter, the the average unreflecting, perhaps not very well instructed citizen who has never been trained or invited to consider the long-term economic implications of the budget, I would have said, might have thought this budget was not too bad.
As I say, he would not be trained to look underneath it, to see what it had failed to do, or he would not be trained to assess its negative impact on the areas I have mentioned. At any rate, so far as the ostensible shape of the budget is concerned, taking it at its face value, I would have said the ordinary punter — had I seen the Minister's speech before he came in to deliver it — might have been expected to grumble at the excise impositions, but they are very much part of every budget. Very seldom do we have a budget when there are not several pence on the items which were hit again this time. Otherwise, seeing the year that is in it, I would have said he might have been reasonably pleased. Nobody could deny that the social welfare increases are generous. Nobody could deny that there are positive elements, in the sense of the promised tax relief for investment in private sector residential accommodation. There are positive things. I would have said that by the time the impact of the excise increases had worn off and the social welfare increases were coming through, the average, unreflecting, unthinking voter might have felt he had got a reasonably good deal out of a Government in a difficult year. That is all on the assumption that the budget is an honest one and not phoney. But of course the unreflecting citizen is not really in a position to probe the question to what extent the budget is phoney or not. That is left to the Opposition in here and to economic commentators outside. I want to contribute my own views on that in a few moments.
Why is the average voter dissatisfied? Why, with what have to be admitted are generous increases on the social welfare side, is there such general hostility to and dissatisfaction with the budget? That is something which is very new, interesting and indeed sinister for all of us and not just for the party temporarily in occupation over there. I think The Irish Press— by the way just in case it is thought that this is as bogus as the budget, this pink slip is simply because we happen to have had pink paper in our copying machine upstairs when I inserted the sacred script under the glass — in its editorial of 30 January 1981 put its finger on it. In its editorial of the previous day it had been commenting in a way which might have been expected of The Irish Press— patting the Minister on the back, saying all the nice things to him and so on. But 24 hours rolled past and The Irish Press were obviously astonished by the hostile reaction they were getting. In an editorial which was incoherent, published the following day, the 30th, they tried to explore the reason for the hostile reaction. I am afraid I gave a wry smile when I saw this:
The trouble is
——said the Burgh Quay thunderer——
that we live in and have been conditioned to live in, a society of rising expectations, and to be fair——
——this is a collector's item and I suspect that copies of this issue are even now being eagerly snapped up —
the Government must now privately, ruefully acknowledge that part of these expectations were raised by the architects of the Fianna Fáil manifesto for the last General Election.
I did not write editorial, nor did any of my pals. That editorial was produced by The Irish Press, and that is their explanation for the extraordinary fact that, at least obstensibly, a relatively easy budget from the punter's point of view has encountered a hostile reaction. The punters want the earth. Why do they want the earth? Because they were skilfully told by the genius of Senator Eoin Ryan and his team that they could have the earth if they voted for Fianna Fáil, that nothing except the malice and the incompetents of the National Coalition stood between them and the earth; that all they needed to do was to roll out in their hundreds of thousands and put out those grasping, incompetents, Liam Cosgrave, Richie Ryan, Michael O'Leary, Jim Tully and all the rest of them, that the sun would come up over the horizon with a jump and it would be sunshine all the way.
What is the result now? The result is — as I have often said before when perhaps it was not as evident to all as it is now — that people are demoralised. They are not willing to carry any burden. They are willing only that their neighbours should carry burdens. That characteristic which is always there to some extent in a free people, is far more visible and stronger now than when we were in office. When we were there the people grumbled. Certainly we made mistakes. If I had those years all over again I think I would have advised, and I am sure many of us would have advised one another to avoid doing this or that, or to do something we omitted to do. I do not make any secret about that. But there was a kind of an attempt, and it was a persistent attempt, to behave with the economy as though the next election was irrelevant. There was a kind of an attempt to behave as though the people ought not to be fooled and codded, that the budgetary mechanism, in so far as it influences the economy, should be responsibly deployed. That has not been done since then. There was grumbling then, the people were dissatisfied, but I am coming to the belief — I hope this will not be used as a stick to beat myself with — that you cannot have a people who are not grumbling and a healthy economy at the same time. Perhaps you can for a short period in a time of economic boom which is fuelled along by an externally generated tail wind; perhaps you can have it then. But at other times, when a country has to generate its own lift, particularly starting from a low base as we are, if the economy is being properly run the people are going to grumble. I am afraid that is a kind of axiom — you can call it my law if you like — it does not hold true all the time, but it is a fair guess, that, if the people are grumbling, some attempt is being made to run the economy properly. It is a very curious and worrying phenomenon that a budget which is going to give the entire social welfare category a 25 per cent increase in a couple of months' time should have encountered such huge resentment. Admittedly the taxation reliefs are insignificant and they are going to be eaten away anyway by the cost of living rise which the taxation provisions and the excise provisions imply.
Nonetheless in a hard year I would have said it was not a bad budget and that is how it has been received. I say it is not a bad budget but I want to remind the Minister that I began with a pretty big hypothesis that the figures on both sides of the line are correct figures, are true figures, that we can believe and trust these figures. One economic commentator, the following morning, did not put a tooth in it, that is the political commentator in The Irish Times, Paul Tansey. I have never seen him at a political meeting; I have never seen him at a Fine Gael meeting and I do not know the gentleman, good, bad or indifferent. I read his stuff with interest and have always regarded him as a perfectly independent commentator. He said hard things about the Coalition in the past and no doubt some of them were justified.
Within hours of reading the budget statement he was able to file copy in his paper the first sentence of which was "The sums in this year's budget do not add up". They do not add up. There are people over there and they may not be near to the joystick or the cockpit on the economic front but they must know themselves that these figures do not add up. I will explain why I am saying that. First of all there are allowances in the Minister's budget speech which he is giving himself off the expenditure side, sums which he is identifying as ones for which he does not now have to find the money. I have to describe these allowances which he is making himself as unhatched chickens and he is making himself generous allowances on the strength of them.
The first one is referred to on page 27 of the budget speech and it is an allowance of £25 million. I have had to complain about this speech so often. If he was trying to give me a laugh he could not have pitched this more accurately into the middle of the court I happen to occupy. He says that the sheer size of the public sector and the amount of finance required to sustain it suggest that there is considerable opportunity for savings by rationalising its programmes, administrative machinery and structures, staffing and systems. He says that an inter-Departmental task force is being established. Did anyone ever hear the like of it? An inter-Departmental task force is being established to make a critical appraisal of the scope for such action and to draw up proposals as a matter of urgency. I can imagine that in the first draft whoever wrote this rubbish out forgot to put in that magic phrase "as a matter of urgency" and someone else came over to him and said "Pat, you forgot the matter of urgency bit" so in went the matter of urgency. This is to achieve savings each year of £25 million. The Minister says that on the basis of these savings which will be identified and implemented he is making a deduction of £25 million from the budget expenditure. He does that just like that. I have to pay my housekeeping bills at home the same as any married man or woman in the House. I know the reception I would get if I simply said that I was going to set up a committee consisting of two or three of my children and my wife and we were going to identify ways of rationalising expenditure and on the basis that we are going to successfully identify these rationalisations as a matter of urgency I was going to make a deduction of £10 in my next week's housekeeping money. No one conducts their business like that, no one dealing with other people, and who is dealing with more other people than the Minister for Finance at budget time? How could he expect to be taken seriously with a projection of that kind?
Let me remind the House that this is a Government which came to office in 1977 with an acceptance speech from Deputy Lynch, just elected Taoiseach, in which he put reform of the public service at the forefront of his programme. He was absolutely right in doing so. But unfortunately there was no follow through. There was a minister for the Public Service, a special Minister for the Public Service for a couple of years — the very man, oddly enough, who is now sitting in the Department of Finance. If it is easy to save £25 million by setting up an inter-Departmental task force as a matter of urgency, why did he not do it two or three years ago? This is simply a sum of money picked out of the sky. The main problem with the public service — and I have said this and been misunderstood for saying it — has nothing to do with any of the individuals in it. Nobody in the public service can be blamed for being in it or can be blamed for expecting and building on their monthly salary. Nobody can be blamed for joining it and everybody knows, and we are killed saying this, that it is model of incorruptibility and, I must frankly say in my own experience, of courtesy and helpfulness and I cannot speak highly enough about it from that point of view. There are simply too many of them, and when Mr. John Costello was Taoiseach here towards the end of the first Coalition Government there were 29,000 people in the non-industrial civil service. We are now within spitting distance of having twice that number. I will give the exact figures in a moment.
In other words, in an era which has seen computerisation, office aids, the micro-chip and the devil knows what things which we are told would decimate employment in the private sector, things which we are told are going to be the big problem for us in the future because insurance companies and banks will be able to get through their paper work with the touch of a button instead of armies of clerks, in that very same period we have succeeded in almost doubling the number of people on the public payroll. We have not only done that but we are paying them relatively better — and I have to admit that every Deputy in this House has had the benefit because of a certain parity, including myself — and improving their conditions far faster and without any risk to themselves. I know that Deputies have a risk because they can lose their seats. But the rest have not got the same risk to themselves as people in the private sector have to endure all their working lives, and they have inflation —geared pensions at the end of it.
We cannot carry this burden. I believe there is no reason why it should have grown to this level. It runs away now with over half the budget, over half the enormous sums of money — over £3.5 billion — that the Minister for Finance was in here getting the Dáil to vote and seeking budget approval for; half of that goes on public service pay. In January 1977 — there is a July 1977 figure and I am sorry I have not got it but I can tell the House it is not very different from the January 1977 figure because we had an embargo on public service recruitment — there were 48,670 public servants in the non-industrial civil service, in other words not counting the Garda Síochána, the Army or teachers. In January 1980, three years later, that figure had risen to 53,822 and in the last 12 months, since Deputy Haughey took over as Taoiseach it has gone up by another 1,000.
Where is the justification for that? What are they all doing? We have now got an army corps of civil servants. What are they all doing that could not be done with half the number? I quite realise that the volume of the public service has expanded in 30 years. I am not trying to say we can run the country as we ran it in 1950. But I am saying that when one takes account of the fact that this is an age of mechanical, electronic rationalisation the increase should have have been nothing like as steep. It seems to be inexorable; it seems to be self-generating; it seems to be uncontrollable. Even in the last 12 months, between January 1980 and January 1981, the numbers in that non-industrial civil service rose from 53,822 to 54,738. The implications of even another 1,000 civil servants from the point of view of paying them, of making provisions ultimately for their inflation-proof pensions, for housing them, for heating them, for paying their travel and incidental expenses, are crushing and there is absolutely no trace of rationalisation. The only move ever to rationalise the thing — and I admit it was a crude one but it was effective — was the embargo placed on recruitment by us in which, no doubt, some ends of the service found themselves temporarily short-handed but at least it had the effect of preventing this apparently endless ballooning of the public service.
I do not want anyone to misunderstand the importance of this but anything which runs away with even 10 per cent, let alone over 50 per cent, of the national budget is a very serious matter. When one adds to that that 27p in every revenue £ is paid out in interest on the public debt, one can see that the amount of money left for things like infrastructure, building schools, investing in industry and so on, is very small.
This is a deadly serious matter. There has been no rationalisation except the very crude measure we introduced. I do not believe for one second that the numbers in the public service will fall this year. All this task force means is that half a dozen highly qualified and well paid people will be taken from the jobs they are doing at present and put on to a job they know is futile because there is not the political will to make cuts. Naturally, I do not mean to make anyone redundant, but we must allow for natural wastage to be absorbed in some kind of reorganisation within the service. That figure of £25 million was plucked out of the air and ought not to have been introduced in a budget statement. If he had been able to do this quietly, without making it a part of a budget promise, well and good and he could have come back here and boasted about it next year, but that is a bogus figure.
The Minister in his speech told us he was in favour of involving the private sector in public investment. It is not today or yesterday that that was first talked about. When was the first time we heard it said a private interest was going to build another Liffey bridge on the east side of the Custom House? Is it two years or three years? Where is the bridge? Where are the plans? Where are the tenders? A year ago we passed an Act in regard to toll roads. Where is the first toll road plan? Are there tenders out? In his speech the Minister said:
The Government have decided to strengthen this relationship by inviting a more active participation from the private sector in capital development. The Government believe that this policy will be to the maximum benefit of the economy and will advance the pace of national development.
Discussions have already been held with a range of private sector interests in order to explore the extent to which their support might be forthcoming, particularly for investment in infrastructure. These preliminary soundings have been encouraging——
like a man dousing for a well
——and, as a result, the Government have adopted a target of £200 million——
Why did he not say £300 million? Or what would be wrong with £500 million, a nice round figure? Surely there is that much money disposable in the private sector? I am not in this area of the private sector and I do not claim to have first-hand knowledge of it, but I noticed that Mr. Tansey in the articles I mentioned earlier said — and I made one inquiry from a different quarter which bore out his assessment — that the greybeards in the little complex of Dame Street — Foster Place — Anglesey Street — Crow Street — Trinity Street — St. Andrew Street, the nearest we have to a financial quarter in Dublin, suggested £40 million to £50 million as the maximum figure on any likely investment by the private sector in the public capital programme. How long will it take for that to come on stream? What plans are there for that, let alone for projects which have been mooted two or three years ago, let alone for projects envisaged in legislation passed over a year ago? Where does this figure come from?
I put down a question to the Minister — I suppose it will be reached some time next week — in which I am asking him to explain how he arrived at this figure and on what evidence it was based. In the context of the budget debate all I am saying is that this figure enables the Minister to present his sums as if he had that £200 million in his pocket. Its impact on the budget arithmetic is the very same as if he had £200 million in his pocket. The impact of this laughable proposal to rationalise the public service, when all he has done since he became Minister for the Public Service is to expand it, is the same as if he had £25 million in his pocket.
I will allow him the maximum the Crow Street greybeards are allowing for private sector involvement this year and call it an unhatched egg to the extent of £150 million, adding £25 million for rationalisation, giving £175 million. That sum far exceeds the cost of social welfare improvements this year, which are in the region of £144 million. If these figures, which are suspect in the highest degree, were not in the budget speech the Minister would be left with a further deficit of £175 million. With that deficit he would have had either to forego his social welfare improvements or he would have had to find that money by borrowing. That, of course, is what he will have to do in the end.
Those are two items which are easily identified and made fun of, but I want to point to something more serious in the budget situation. This is something which does not come to light in the budget speech itself but which invites doubt in the Book of Estimates. Several Departments when preparing Estimates are producing figures which are not credible, first, having regard to the records of those Departments and, second, having regard to the current rate of inflation. There are many Estimates which genuinely show substantial increases. For example, the Department of Energy had a budget of less than £10 million last year but this year that figure has been increased to over £15 million. I very much approve of that if this money is devoted to trying to achieve energy conservation. That Department have a realistic increase of about 58 per cent. The Department of Industry, Commerce and Tourism have an increase of 20 per cent; the Department of Education have a very good increase of 25 per cent. These are what I call realistic increases but there is a different picture with other Departments.
Last year the Department of Agriculture needed their Estimate to be topped up by 28 per cent. With that experience behind them, I would have thought a credible Estimate for that Department would show a hefty increase over last year's final figure, but not at all. They show a decrease in pound notes — I am not talking about real terms because they are different — of 12 per cent. The Department of Transport required an extra 27 per cent last year; this year they show a decrease of 15 per cent. Last year the Department of Health had to be topped up by 23 per cent but this year in money terms they show an increase of only 3 per cent and, in real terms, this will mean a decrease of 12 per cent. The decreases in real terms in the case of the other two Departments will be much worse.
I do not believe those Estimates. I do not believe the Ministers or the officials responsible for them believe them either. The officials have to do what they are told and I am sure it was with heavy hearts that the officials in the Departments of Transport, Agriculture and Health allowed these figures to go forward. I will not speculate about what they may have said to one another but I can imagine it.
I hope you will not think it a low punch if I draw some political conclusions from those comparisons. The Minister for Energy, the Minister for Industry, Commerce and Tourism and the Minister for Education, if I might delicately so put it, are on one side of an intangible but very important line inside the Government. Deputy Colley and Deputy O'Malley simply would not allow doctored Estimates to be put forward on behalf of their Departments — perhaps "doctored" is too strong — they would not allow unrealistic Estimates to be put forward. The other three Ministers, Deputy Mac-Sharry, Deputy Reynolds and Deputy Woods are all Haughey promotions. They were evidently willing to allow unrealistic Estimates to be put forward. I cannot speculate to what extent, in money terms, these Estimates are unrealistic. There are other unrealistic things in the Estimates, for example, the idea that we are going to spend only one-third in recouping local authorities for malicious injuries this year compared to what we spent last year. I do not know how the Government have become convinced that vandalism is suddenly running out of steam.
There are plenty of other weak spots in the Estimates. Some Departments have wildly slashed their estimates for travel expenses, postal expenses, telephone expenses and so forth. Just sticking to these three Departments, you will see we are talking about huge sums of money, with virtual certainty — I am not alone in saying this because all commentators have pointed out the same thing though not perhaps with the same political bile which I have brought into it — the unreality of these Estimates. If you add a nominal sum — the Minister, Deputy Fitzgerald, can pick it out of the air, let me do the same — the Supplementary Estimates last year for these three Departments totalled about £187 million. That is the total of the Supplementary Estimates, which in these three Departments alone, had to be produced.
Let me take a flying guess and say that with a bit of belt pinching these three Departments will be responsible in the coming year for a further £100 million by way of Supplementary Estimates. Add that sum to the £175 million which I see short fallen in those two suspect projections in regard to rationalisation of the public service and private sector involvement, and we are getting into very big money, over the quarter billion mark. Relate that then to the Minister's boast in regard to what he has done to the borrowing requirements, because this is really what the whole thing is about. What are we doing in regard to our borrowing? The Minister boasted in his budget speech that he has succeeded in making considerable progress. This must rank among the least candid statements ever contained in a Budget Statement. He says it represents substantial progress, that this year's borrowings, as a result of the budget, will be reduced from last year's figure of 14½ per cent of GNP to 13 per cent this year. It is quite true that the figures, as he presents them, show a borrowing figure of 13 per cent. It is quite true that 13 per cent is better than the 14½ per cent of GNP which the Government found themselves borrowing last year. What the Minister did not say was that 14½ per cent was not the targeted figure last year but exceeded the target figure by 4 percentage points. The targeted figure, which the former Minister for Finance, Deputy O'Kennedy, produced in the budget speech of February, 1980, was 10½ per cent and it was overshot by 4 percentage points.
It is small credit to the present Minister for Finance if he says 13 per cent is an improvement on 14½ per cent. Thirteen per cent is a targeted figure, not the end figure, just as 14½ per cent was not the targeted figure but was the end figure. Comparable things should be compared with one another and incomparable things should not. This is not an improvement if this borrowing requirement is going to be over-shot. At 13 per cent it is already miles above what the Fianna Fáil Party told us we were going to have to borrow this year back in 1977. Add now to it the extra likely borrowing on the experience of last year and on the bogus figures in the Budget Statement and we are within spitting distance of 20 per cent of GNP. That is an absolutely appalling situation. It might be 17 per cent or 18 per cent, something like that, within a very short distance of 20 per cent. It will be no trouble to the Government to pretend the following year, if the same Government are still there that they were not really doing much worse than the previous year at borrowing one-fifth of the gross national product to sustain expenditure, most of which is current day to day expenditure. That is a record of absolute disaster.
I have often protested about budget debates, this ritual ding-dong which becomes progressively less interesting to the public. As I once said, it is like Japanese ritual fencers with their padded staves beating one another — predictable speeches coming from both sides. I have a recollection of budget debates in the last Dáil and Deputy Richie Ryan meant the stuff in his budget speech and I suppose he enraged people by apparently not only meaning it but feeling it. I have no doubt that Deputy Colley and Deputy O'Malley meant their stuff but there is an unreality about what is happening now because the Estimates are, to a very important extent, bogus Estimates. The budget speech, because of the features I have mentioned, (a) relying on the bogus Estimates and (b) gratuitously making allowances from the expenditure side in respect of sums pulled out of the air, is an unreal budget speech. What is the exercise all about?
I am not really sure that there is much point in this budget mystique, the big occasion of the year with everyone trying to get more than his fair share of tickets from the unfortunate Superintendent, the ladies coming in and having their dresses described in the papers the next day. All that mystique is, naturally, borrowed from the British, Paddies that we are: the battered dispatch box which even a republican Minister for Finance does not distain, holding it up in ridiculous foreshortening — I suppose he is the one who is foreshortened — to the camera as he sets out from Government Buildings.
I object to all that reach-me-down British mystique, not just for that reason but also because it builds up this false occasion and that false occasion puts a Government and a Minister under a strong subconscious pressure to produce some kind of nosegay or little bouquet of measures which will be cosmetically acceptable. He should not have to do that. He should not have to go through this rigmarole. He should be able to fine tune the economy. I do not mean monthly budgets in the sense of a monthly imposition of taxation but the economy and the fiscal mechanism which operates should be at the Minister's command all the year around. It was in our time when we put 15p on a gallon of petrol in a single measure. This Government have done equivalent things and, no doubt, will again. It should be accepted that that is the way to run an economy which can suffer shipwreck from some single event happening in the middle of the year in which no budget is in sight. There is something really meaningless about debating what we are debating today. Everybody knows, inside and outside the House, that these Estimates are going to be miles overshot by the end of 1981.
Everyone knows that the allowances which the Minister is making are unreal. Another unreal feature is the Minister's allowance for special pay awards in the public service. In the last two budget years, those special pay awards have cost — I am taking the two years together — £260 million. In 1980, although an allowance for them of £100 million was made, in the end they cost £190 million. The Minister is doing his sums now on the basis that they are going to cost £80 million which is less than one-third of what they cost in the year gone by. What kind of sums are these? How real is any budget which is put together on the basis of sums like that?
Those references in the Minister's speech to the public service were not only taken up with the provision he was making for special increases. In one part of his speech he made an astonishing statement in which he more or less begged the public service to go easy on him. Imagine that kind of thing coming from a Government. What is a government for? They are elected to govern and not to go along pleading to people, sucking up to them or licking their boots. The Minister stated:
The Government fully appreciate the contribution that public servants are making to national development——
And so do I, and I mean that sincerely.
——but, in the present critical situation, they would hope that public servants would have regard to the greater degree of security attaching to their employment and be prepared to moderate, or not to press, claims which they otherwise would consider justified. I would earnestly ask all concerned to consider the matter seriously in the national interest. Failure to respond to this appeal will regrettably mean the imposition of further taxation and reduction of services.
That is a statement of cause and effect. There should be such a thing as a political will which interposes between that supposed cause and that supposed effect. Did the Minister ever hear of saying "no"? Does the Minister know what it is to say "no" or does his party? Governments are elected to do such things and if they are not tough enough to do so they should leave and make room for those who will say it. I am not pleading for a wage stop or anything like that; I am not pleading for any sort of unreasonable conduct but if a Government feel that a wage claim advanced on behalf of the public sector is not reasonable they should not concede it. For a Minister for Finance to say in his speech that if his appeal is not responded to the result will be further taxation is to abandon and abdicate his own job and position. He must say "No" and take the political consequences.
There is an element in between the will of people who want something outside the House, in other words the public sector or something else, and what has to be done here, and that will is the Government's will. There can be no plainer statement than that lamentable sentence I quoted from the Minister's script to the effect that that will is not there. The Minister, Deputy Fitzgerald is not willing to mobilise it and the man who appointed him has not got the will. I have known that always. It comes as no surprise to me because I know he is a man with no fixed standards in matters of this kind. However, I have never seen it stated so baldly and lamentably before.
Those things occur to me in regard to the nature of the budget, the figures which underlie it, the way it was presented and the unreality of the debate surrounding it. One more year has gone by; one more year's major economic statement by the Government has passed and the opportunity has gone, although all eyes were upon it — I believe public opinion would have been with them to some extent — to make some effort to address ourselves to the things which are holding our economy back. We live in the middle of a prosperous sea with the prosperity of the United States on the west and prosperity to the east in continental Europe and I have no doubt that as time goes on we will progress. Recessions will pass and things will get better but we are being unnecessarily held back by lamentable industrial relations because of lack of courage in dealing with them. We are also held back by the unfettered growth in the burden the State must carry in the shape of a swollen public service.
The rationalisation talk comes interestingly from a Government who do not know what they are doing in regard to the public service. I am glad the Minister responsible for transport is present because I should like to mention something which appeared in a newspaper last week and got little attention compared to what it deserved. The Irish Times on 26 January reported that the Irish Congress of Trade Unions had secured a commitment from Deputy Haughey that there would be no hiving off of any parts of the public sector to private enterprise. That arose in the context of the McKinsey report on CIE but the Minister in the previous days was killed assuring the ICTU that a decision has not been made in the matter good, bad or indifferent. I should like to ask the Minister which of the statements is true? Has a decision been reached?