At the outset I would like to take the opportunity of offering on my own behalf and on behalf of the Progressive Democrats our congratulations to you on your unanimous election to the Chair and to wish you well for the currency of the 25th Dáil, however long that will be.
Next, I would like to offer my congratulations to Deputy Haughey on his election as Taoiseach and to wish him well both for his sake personally and for the sake of the country because of the Office he now holds which is the most onerous in this country. He is holding this Office at a time which has few parallels in terms of difficulties that the country faces at present.
This debate is on the appointment of members of the Government and I have before me a list which, to put it mildly, does not contain any surprise, or anything terribly imaginative, new or radical. It looks to me as a recipe for a lot of the same again. In many respects that is a pity. I am not just talking about personnel, I am also talking about some of the ways proposed to tackle some of the problems and some of the changes which are proposed, some additional agencies of one kind or another.
The great disappointment in many respects is that it is only additional agencies. A country which is absolutely weighed down with agencies, bureaucracies and offices of one kind or another is to have additional ones rather than fewer. It is, for example, disappointing to find that the Department of the Public Service is now to disappear in a nominal way. It will no longer have a separate Minister and will once more be a minor adjunct, as it was in the past, of the Department of Finance. The only time in my experience that any worthwhile progress was made in regard to reform of the public service was when Deputy Boland was Minister for that Department and for no other for a period of some years. It is not possible for a Minister for Finance, particularly at a time like this, to devote the sort of time that is needed to the reorganisation of the public service.
Our public service is enormous. It is extremely costly. It is full of people of excellent calibre but it is not particularly effective given the structures under which it has to continue to operate and which have long since gone out of date. In relation to the very limited amount of reorganisation that is taking place I welcome particularly one aspect of that reorganisation, that is the merging of the tourism and transport functions, functions which have been together for many years.
I welcome the Taoiseach's statement that:
Transport must be managed and developed in future as an essential element of a dynamic tourism policy and, in particular, access costs to this island must become more competitive if we are to recover the ground we have lost in recent years in the growth of international tourism.
I fought a lone battle on that point in 1984. I challenged a number of divisions on what was essentially that point but the divisions never took place because the count was one in favour and everybody else against. It is remarkable that within a two year period what I was then derided for has now become the official policy of the Government and of such importance that it is set out in the initial short speech of the Taoiseach on the appointment of the Government. It is surprising what can be achieved by someone who insists on fighting his corner in this respect.
In relation to the five Ministers of State — I suppose a consolation list — announced tonight, I would have thought no more than two further appointments would be necessary, but I am sure many more appointments will be made. In some respects it is a pity that areas such as the food industry, trade and marketing and science and technology which are of enormous importance and which the Taoiseach is right to recognise in a specific way, will be operated by Ministers of State rather than by members of the Cabinet. I hope that will not have the effect of downgrading them in the sense that agencies of different kinds which are run by Ministers of State tend to get overlooked if members of the Cabinet are not involved.
I did not have an opportunity to speak in the earlier debate today and it is appropriate that I refer to some of the things said. We had an avalanche of the new terminology which has been in use in this country in the past few months — references to the three right wing parties and, particularly, references to what Deputy Blaney and others described as the far right. This amuses me because if some of the things we as a party are talking about and in respect of which we got an exceptional response in the recent general election, are to be described as right wing in the pejorative manner in which people use that phrase in Ireland at present, then nearly everything the late Seán Lemass did in his time as Taoiseach, and in part of his time as Minister for Industry and Commerce, could be described as being of the far right. If to encourage enterprise is to be regarded as of the far right, then those using that terminology are rather wide of the mark. If to do what some of the leading socialists in Europe are endeavouring to do in their own countries is to be described as of the far right, it shows how foolish political terminology in this country has become.
At the core of our problems is the excessive appetite which has been generated in this country for public expenditure. Last year 68 per cent of our gross national product was consumed by the State in one form or another, a percentage which is way beyond anything in western Europe, a percentage which is way beyond the figure in Britain, France, Spain and various other countries. Nonetheless, people like Fabius, who up to recently was the socialist Prime Minister of France and Gonzales, at present Prime Minister of Spain, find it necessary to take steps that they regard as of commonsense in their efforts to curb the level of public expenditure in their respective countries. If they regard that as a matter of commonsense, why is it a matter of ideology for us to want to curb our level of public expenditure when it far exceeds that of any country in western Europe? Why is it regarded as right wing and ideological to want to curb public expenditure in this way in order that we might achieve a situation where this country will no longer have the highest level of direct and indirect taxation?