We are having this confidence debate because the Government have undermined confidence in the political system and confidence in our institutions. They have undermined the confidence of the Irish people in themselves. The Government, by producing a fraudulent budget in 1991, laid the foundation for the undermining of the national finances. This Government in the way they negotiated the Programme for Economic and Social Progress knowingly made commitments that the State could not afford. They deceived people. They undermined the trust on which good industrial relations is based. This Government, by forcing spending Estimates through without examination and all in one vote last July, undermined the constitutional role of Dáil Éireann.
This Government, sleepwalking through a world-wide economic recession, have presided over the highest level of unemployment and emigration in the history of the State. This Government, in their culture of clever deals and clientelist politics, have lowered standards and contaminated other parts of our society. This Government have abandoned the agricultural community to their fate in Europe, without tabling any alternative to the MacSharry proposals. This Government have allowed the housing problem to grow to the point that we now have 30,000 families in bad housing conditions waiting to be housed. That is the legacy after their four years in office.
This Government have become profoundly unpopular, not because of recent scandals but because those scandals have awakened people to the fact that their Government react to events rather than seek to shape them. The Government reacted to the scandals with a spate of partial investigations but they did not prevent the scandals in the first place through proper ministerial supervision of Government bodies. They reacted with surprise and bafflement to the dramatic growth in unemployment this year, with a spate of task forces but never had and do not now have any coherent employment strategy for next year, the year after or the rest of the century.
They reacted with a series of ill-considered radio interviews to the fact that their 1991 budget, predictably, went off the rails. They followed this instant reaction with inconclusive discussions with the social partners. It is clear now, despite all we have heard, that the Government's entire budgetary strategy has collapsed and they have nothing to put in its place. The 1992 budget is looming, bills must be met but the Government have not begun to consider how they will be met. That is a measure of the Government's loss of a sense of coherence and direction.
As Northern Ireland moves deeper and deeper into sectarian conflict with one murder following another, the Irish Government just sit and occasionally react to the latest move by the British Secretary of State, but they have no policy of their own, and have not had one for the past four years. Neither do they appear to care very much one way or another.
And, probably worst of all in its long-term seriousness, this Government again react helplessly to the latest proposals from others on the shape of the new Europe, on the Common Agricultural Policy, and on the latest proposal on European defence. Again, they have no policy of their own on any of these matters. They have not produced an Irish White Paper on how the new federal Europe should be structured. They are drifting into European defence commitments, with no concept of why they are doing so, apart from a vague and pathetic wish not to be seen to be left out of the club. That is about the depth of the Government's consideration of European issues.
In the real sense of the word, Ireland does not now have a Government. We have Ministers, we have an impressive Government office, much more impressive than four years ago, we have black cars going to official openings, but we do not have anybody planning the nation's future, or at least for more than 48 hours ahead.
Perhaps the most expressive photograph in 1991 of "Mr. Haughey's Ireland," to use the title of a television programme, is that of people, middleaged as well as young, queuing up in Dublin's historic GPO to post off applications for Morrison visas, to get out of here as quickly as possible to the recession-ridden United States. That is the extent of their confidence in "Mr. Haughey's Ireland" after four years of Fianna Fáil.
Even the much touted successes of the earlier years are now seen to have been superficial. The large growth rate of the 1987-88 period is now revealed by students of economics to have been little more than the release of pent-up consumer savings. A large part of the budgetary economies of 1987-89 came from simply postponing pay commitments to the then distant "future". That future has now arrived, the bills must now be paid, and the so-called achievements of earlier years are seen in their true context, postponements, of problems. A large part of the other budgetary economies of that time were also achieved through postponements, postponements of hospital buildings, postponements of school buildings and postponements of house building. All will have to be built eventually but most assuredly by a different Government.
Indeed the most notable feature of the 1987-89 period was the Tallaght Strategy wherein, for the first time in the nation's history, the main Opposition party offered constructive co-operation to a minority Government in the national interest. It says much about the core values of Fianna Fáil that they rejected this new approach in a petulant fashion at the earliest possible opportunity. It also says a great deal about the core values of the Progressive Democrats now absent from the House that they spent those two years doing their very best to sabotage the Tallaght Strategy.
At least the two parties now in Government have that much in common. Neither party in the period 1987 to 1989 had any appreciation of the national interest. Indeed, both parties deservedly lost seats in the subsequent general election. Neither of them have any real regard for the national interest at the present time, otherwise they would not be carrying on the destabilising charade that we have witnessed during the past 13 weeks.
Throughout the past four years there has been virtually no structural reform of the economy, of our institutions or of public spending. Despite promises, there has been no local government reform. Our system is still centralised and our elected councillors have been reduced to being little more then temporary unpaid public relations officers for permanent officialdom.
There has been no reform of the public service. There has been no public service reform Bill, as the Government led by Deputy FitzGerald had planned. There is no reward for exceptional services performed by permanent officials. There is no delegation of formal responsibility to named officials. There is just the continuance of the old system under which all power theoretically resides in the Minister's office, and nothing gets done.
Nor has there been any overall reform of the health service in the past four years. It is still an illness service. It is still hospital centred. It is still over-administered and under-managed. The present Taoiseach still does not hear the message that so much took him by surprise in the middle of the 1989 general election. He could see no crisis in the health service then, just as he could see no jobs crisis earlier this year.
There has been no fundamental educational reform. After four years the Minister for Education is still talking about producing discussion documents. We have had no Education Act, no educational accountability, no educational targets, no comparisons with other countries and no statutory body set up to set and examine the curriculum. After four years the system is still driven by written exams alone. Children are still dropping out of school too early. Access to third level education is still grossly unfair — unfair to those of limited means, and unfair in particular to those whose parents are in the PAYE sector. There is no money to put this right, we are told, but there is money — nearly £10 million — to take Carysfort College off the hands of a friend.
There has been talk of tax reform — enough talk to make people unsure about the future, unsure, in particular, about the future of mortgage interest relief, and thus reluctant, perhaps, to invest in a home. But there has not been much actual tax reform. In a country with a huge shortage of work we tax work in such a way as to make sure that we have even less of it than we had previously. Ireland's tax system, in a country with record levels of unemployment is, quite simply, perverse.
The entire structure of our rural life is about to be devastated. Thousands of PAYE jobs in the food industry are to be destroyed by the MacSharry proposals, without any mention from Commissioner MacSharry of compensation for those PAYE people who lose their jobs. However, this Irish Government have no policy or plan for the future of Irish agriculture, no more than they have tabled any alternative proposals to those put forward by Commissioner MacSharry. They are willing to sit and agree meekly with those proposals, apart from making a few public relations gestures for domestic consumption. Indeed, as all of that happens the same Government are allowing our food industry's remaining good name to be destroyed by intervention scandals, by angel dust and by the failure to eradicate bovine TB.
Meanwhile, however, in Government Buildings it is party politics as usual — Chinese politics, it seems. The Progressive Democrats are like Mao Tse-Tung. He believed in perpetual revolution. They believe in perpetual renegotiation. They cannot make up their minds whether they are part of the Government. They have two voices — one for the Cabinet Room and another for the public gallery. As for the Taoiseach, he sees himself as some sort of ancient Chinese leader who goes on and on and on and on — a depressing self-obsession.
I shall not refer to the content of the Taoiseach's rather foolish speech made in the House today, beyond saying that he made many references to and innuendoes about people who could not defend themselves and then made a reference to a person who is not here in the House, did not elaborate the charge he was making and did not have the grace to withdraw the charge when he was challenged. That says a lot about the extent to which the Taoiseach has thought through what he is doing in this House. I suppose the most charitable thing that could be said about the Taoiseach's speech is that it was in its content and its delivery indicative of the desperate position in which he finds himself.
But let me turn to more fundamental issues. The recent spate of scandals arose precisely because we do not have a proper system of accountable parliamentary democracy in Dáil Éireann. If the Dáil had proper powers of scrutiny, and if the Government and State bodies had felt themselves to be genuinely accountable to the House on an ongoing basis in the past four years, then none of those scandals would ever have happened. It is because the Dáil has not been reformed, because the Dáil does not have the means to call Ministers and State bodies to account before decisions are taken that there has been this depressing and damaging succession of scandals. The source of the problem lies ultimately in the unreformed nature of this House.
Last July £6 billion of taxpayers' money was approved here, at the Government's request and with the agreement of other parties, in a single Vote, without a single item of spending being scrutinised. That done, this Government then sent the entire House off on holidays for three months. If that is the way this House treats the approval of the spending of £6 billion, is it any wonder that State companies have acquired a rather light-hearted way of dealing with the expenditure of a mere £1 million or £2 million? The problem starts here in this House. Neither Ministers nor permanent officials are ever asked to come before a committee of this House to explain before they spend taxpayers' money why they propose to spend it in a particular way. There is no parliament in Europe where that would be the case except this one. As elected representatives we are uniquely irresponsible. That is why we continue to have scandals. That is why this party are determined to take office in this country in order to reform Dáil Éireann and our political system. Until that happens we will have the risk continuing of a recurrence of the sort of situation that has done so much damage in this country over the last two months. Of course in this House we are great, and indeed this Government are particularly good, at ordering inquiries and looking for papers after the harm has been done, when the money is already misspent. That would not be necessary if the Dáil had been allowed do its job properly in the first place. Again, because Ministers themselves are not held accountable here in this House, in turn they do not feel any need to hold State boards responsible for accounting to them until it is too late. That is the price we pay for not having a proper working committee system here in Dáil Éireann.
Facing an exploding jobs crisis earlier this year Fine Gael, a party of 55 Deputies, formally proposed the establishment of an all-party forum on jobs, indeed a call that was supported by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions. It is a measure of the contempt in which this Taoiseach holds the Dáil and its Members that he did not even have the manners to reply to that offer from the second largest party in the House in the face of a jobs crisis of historic proportions.
Next year the Irish people will vote in a referendum to approve a fundamental change in the constitution of the European Community. That is what it is behind all the gobbledegook about Inter-Governmental Conferences; it is a new constitution for a new Europe. Much of this has been agreed already behind closed doors. Yet no one in this House, this sovereign Assembly, has been allowed to examine, let alone debate, any of the many drafts of this new European Treaty. This House has not been allowed — and will not be allowed as long as this Government remain in office — to make any contribution towards getting the best deal possible for Ireland. Yet the final treaty is to be settled in Maastricht — again behind closed doors — no more than seven weeks from now. The pattern is the same as with all the other issues to which I have just referred. Because this House is not holding the Government to account over their policy on Europe, the Government do not actually need to have a policy and this Government do not have any policy as far as this new development in Europe is concerned. As a result — I say this carefully in the hope that all in this House will listen — we may well be heading for a national disaster in the referendum on the new European Constitution next year. If that happens it will be because Dáil Éireann was not involved in the process and public opinion was not prepared for what the public will be asked to agree next year.
Of course, this lack of accountability suits the Taoiseach's very personal style of government — nothing on paper; no Cabinet minutes; just a quite telephone call, radio interview or, more often, the knowing glare and the job is done; no trace left behind. The muck sticks to other people, disposable people. And the people around him, the 77 Fianna Fáil Deputies, are prepared to go on putting up with this. Well, the Irish people are not prepared to put up with it any longer. That is the message from this House and from my party in this debate; it is time to go.
