I have no doubt that as a result of today's vote the style will change, but does anyone in this House seriously believe that this change of Ministers is going to increase our economic growth, reduce unemployment, keep our emigrants at home or reduce the number leaving school too early? I am sure that question was not even asked when the selections were being made. Of course it will not do these things. Why not? Because the policies have not changed, indeed, there is not a single reference to policy anywhere in this sparse announcement of personnel changes. It is as if personnel mattered for everthing and policy for nothing.
Some of the Ministers who retain their seals of office sat at Cabinet and were collectively responsible, as was the incoming Taoiseach, for the errors of the past five years. What Government need is not a change of personnel in the sense that we have seen today but the establishment and election in this House of a Government who are truly radical in the sense that they are prepared to go to the root of our problems as a nation. We need a Government who are prepared to reduce taxation on work and raise taxes elsewhere to pay for that. We need a Government who will ask our people to change our Constitution so that for the first time the people of this State will fully and heartily accept the existence of a community of one million people on this island who regard themselves to be British as well as Irish, something we have never accepted in this House or as a people. That is radicalism.
We need a Government who will clearly say, as this Government have not yet done, that divorce should be allowed in this country. We need a Government who will introduce educational reform and promote higher standards and broader choices so that we will not come second last in international surveys in certain aspects of educational achievement, as was indicated in a survey published this week. We need a Government who will reform our welfare state to promote an active rather than a dependent society. We need a Government who will reform our legal system so that the amount of money one has no longer decides whether one can afford to get justice in Ireland's court system. We need a Government who will give dignity back to those who are ill, shelter to those who are homeless and a voice to those who are handicapped. All these people count just as much as the Ministers who have been promoted today and the Ministers who have been demoted. Their concerns do not seem to loom very large in anything we have heard so far from the Taoiseach at his initial press conference or his speech today.
We need a Government who will change the system of parliamentary democracy in this House so that democratically elected politicians of all parties will be seen to do a constructive job. We need a Government who will get our people back to work. We need a Government who will seek a mandate which will enable them to restore peace to this deeply troubled, divided and traumatised island of ours. In short, we need a Government with a vision.
Despite its superficial radicalism, I must confess that I do not see any real vision in today's rearrangement of office holders within the Fianna Fáil Party. For those who regard politics as some sort of spectator sport, all these changes are interesting and probably quite diverting in the same way as changes of soccer managers or changes of greyhound trainers, which perhaps is more appropriate as we are talking in a sense about blood sports, and I have no doubt they will fill several column inches in the newspapers tomorrow and maybe for weeks to come. However, for those who expect this House and politics to actually change their lives for the better — I am talking now about people outside this House — and offer them a glimpse of their future, to give them a lead, I am not so sure that these nominations add up to very much at all.
There is one thing I want to say directly to the new Taoiseach: I want him to succeed. The entire profession of politics has been dragged down by the scandals and the failures, particularly those of the past six months. Nobody in this House, and certainly nobody in my party has gained from anything which happened in the past six months. I do not see that any of us has been enriched by the misfortune of anyone on the other side of the House. All of us have suffered from what has happened. When I say I want the Taoiseach to succeed I mean it because it is up to him and the Ministers he has chosen to restore respect to the profession of politics so that people will begin, which they certainly have not done for the last six months, to look at us in this House and say, these are people who are telling us something about our future, these are people we respect, these are people who are leading us somewhere.
I hope that when the time comes for a general election the result will be very different to the one of 1989 which has given this very indirect mandate for the formation of this Government; in fact, I am very confident that the result will be very different. In the meantime, I hope the Government are successful, not just economically but also in restoring respect to democratic politics. In that sense, both personally and politically, I wish the Taoiseach, Deputy Albert Reynolds, every success.
I have already offered him co-operation on an all-party approach to the jobs problem; I suggested the setting up of an all-party forum on jobs. I am surprised there was no reference to this in his announcement today. He was being offered an unusual opportunity, an opportunity which reflected the seriousness of unemployment. Indeed, it would have given him an opportunity to show that when he spoke at his press conference of his Government being one who believed in consultation, not confrontation, of not being a Government who were defensive, on his first day in office he was offered by the main Opposition party and others an opportunity to give real meaning to those words by bringing politicians on all sides of the House together with the social partners to tackle the greatest scourge this country has — the fact that 270,000 people find their lives entirely wasted by unemployment. I offered him the opportunity to sweep aside partisan politics for once and bring all the House together to tackle that problem, perhaps denying the Opposition in that process some of the opportunity they might otherwise have of embarrassing the Government by taking some small share in the responsibility. Perhaps it is indicative of the Taoiseach's sense that all that really counts is what happens within Fianna Fáil that he did not take up that offer of an all-party jobs forum. I think it was a mistake, a mistake the Taoiseach will not have to wait long to regret.
I also proposed that we co-operate to reform the Dáil so that all of us would share some responsibility, through a committee system, for the budgetary and legislative decisions which the Government must make. There are issues like Europe, Northern Ireland and local government reform where the parties can and should work together. Fine Gael have shown many times before that they are willing to be constructive, but we will also be vigilant. We will not accept it if the prerogatives of this House are taken over by those outside it or by the Executive, as has happened so often in recent months. We demand now the introduction of a comprehensive ethics code not just for the chairmen and members of boards of semi-State bodies but for politicians in this House and in Government. We demand a comprehensive ethics cose with the means of enforcing it.
This side of the House, as long as we remain here, will relentlessly expose the type of moral cowardice — that is what it was that allowed the budgets of 1990, 1991 and 1992 to dishonestly conceal and postpone financial problems — that is what those three budgets did — leaving others to deal with them later. Not only is that bad financial practice; it is moral cowardice. They are not the types of budgets the Fine Gael Party in Government introduced. Those on this side of the House often have been the subject of criticism for our approach to these matters but one thing we have never shown is the sort of moral cowardice that was demonstrated in the budgets to which I referred, two of which bore the hand of the new Taoiseach. We will continue relentlessly to expose that type of moral cowardice in this House, and hopefully our work will ensure that it does not recur.
It is regrettable that in the only policy statement the Taoiseach has made since becoming leader of the Fianna Fáil Party — namely, his press conference — he did not refer to the imminent destruction of the economic base of rural Ireland in the form of the radical destruction of the Common Agricultural Policy arising from the European Community's financial problems and from the world trade round, an issue that affects the lives of so many of the people of this country, including many of his constituents. Combined with the increasing volatility of the world computer industry, the other pillar of our economy, we see Ireland's two major economic sectors, food and electronics, under imminent threat. Yet neither sector merited a mention in what the Taoiseach had to say at his press conference.
Our two major sectors are under imminent threat because, as far as economic policy-making is concerned on the international stage, the Irish Government over the past four years, abdicated responsibility to outside decision-makers. They abdicated responsibility as far as agriculture is concerned to Commission officials and they abdicated responsibility as far as industrial development is concerned to multinational chairmen of boards whom Ministers visit from time to time. Indeed they abdicated responsibility for much of our future to officials of the European Community who are conducting the world trade negotiations. Irish Ministers of our sovereign Government in the past four years have become mere supplicants on the international stage, not people with a vision of a common European future in which Ireland can play a pivotal role but people going to meetings in Brussels and elsewhere, hoping to get as much as they can and give as little as possible. That is the level to which international economic strategy-making has sunk here. In a sense our political leadership has abdicated responsibility to others outside this country not only for the shaping of the policy of Europe but also for our internal affairs.
The Taoiseach has spoken of consultation, but this should mean consultation with the Dáil, not just with the Deputies in his own party. The consultation which has dominated the Governments of which he has been a member up to now has been consultation not with this House but in private with outside interest groups. In particular policy on employment creation here has been devised exclusively in consultation with those who have jobs. Is it any wonder that the proposals in the Programme for Economic and Social Progress as far as jobs are concerned display no sense of urgency about job creation when the only people who were consulted about it were those who have jobs?
The Taoiseach must recognise that the jobs crisis here will not be solved within the framework of Government policies as set out in the Government's joint programme. Corporatist policies, such as those in the Programme for Economic and Social Progress, that are driven by the interests of those who have jobs are not the best way to help those who have no jobs. Tax policies dictated by the Progressive Democrats designed primarily to reduce top tax rates and give maximum benefit to those on £100,000 a year or more are not the best way to spend the limited amount of money that is available to restore incentives to work for those on the average industrial wage or less. Because the Fianna Fáil Party have no tax ideas and no economic ideas of their own, in policy terms they are like a blank sheet of paper upon which the Progressive Democrats can write whatever they wish.
The Programme for Government and the Programme for Economic and Social Progress would not even be claimed by those who wrote them to be a solution to Ireland's fundamental economic problems. It is even tacitly admitted by their authors that they are mere short term arrangements designed to serve the immediate needs of those who signed them. Yet the Taoiseach admitted at his press conference that as far as economic policy is concerned we have the Programme for Economic and Social Progress and the joint programme. That is all he had to offer: policies that were drafted by his predecessor. He did not offer any suggestion that those policies were going to be changed, and nobody took him up on that because of course we have come to accept that it does not really matter what the policies are. What is of real interest is who will be Minister for the Marine, who will be Chief Whip and who will be Taoiseach. It is all about personalities, about what is going to be done.
I do not believe that the existing policies that have been so readily, almost casually, accepted by the Taoiseach as continuing indefinitely will solve Ireland's jobs problems. Ireland's problems are so profound — violence, unemployment, alienation — that one Government, whether they last two years, two months or four years, will not solve them on their own. Any one Government's timescale is too short and their electoral needs are too pressing for the profound and radical steps that are necessary to bear fruit. That is why this Government should, through an all-party jobs forum, use the talent and experience of all sides of this House to improve Government legislation and scrutinise all Government spending and budgetary proposals in advance through a Dáil committee system. Such a system would force all Deputies, including the Opposition, to face problems openly, and recognise that while we compete and disagree from time to time we must do so within realistic financial limits. For that reason I see Dáil reform as crucial to restoring sensible long term thinking to Irish politics, something that has been gravely lacking for the last four years. That is the sort of profound reform that would lift politics onto a new plane here.
The new Taoiseach's remarks on Northern Ireland, so far at least, have been disappointing. Everything he has said, including his remarks on Articles 2 and 3, will be "on the table" whenever, if ever, anyone gets to the table. Do the Government have so little pride that they are prepared to just sit back and allow Irish people to die needlessly, waiting for initiatives from other people to create a table around which the Government will sit? Is that the sort of Government we want, a Government that will just sit and wait for other people to put forward proposals and then say: "we will put proposals on the table so long as someone else makes the first move"?
Do the Government have so little pride in terms of our Constitution that they wait for talks while others tell us what changes should be made? Surely if our Constitution needs to be changed we should be the first people to suggest how it should be changed. Yet the Fianna Fáil approach is to say and do nothing about Northern Ireland. They say obliquely that if a discussion forum is established they will be forthcoming in some unspecified way about what they will do. That approach essentially is to sit back and let it happen, it is a Pontius Pilate attitude. We are not to expect them to take any initiative to bring about talks. So far as they are concerned that is a matter for other people but if the various interests manage to get around the table eventually Fianna Fáil will start to think about the process. The Constitution is at issue. If we are concerned about the carnage in Northern Ireland we in this House should be the first to take an initiative to change our Constitution, to show that we respect the rights of the one million people living on this island whose ancestors have been here for the past 300 years and who are as Irish as anyone here but have a different allegiance from us. However, there is no sign in anything the Taoiseach, Deputy Reynolds, has said so far to indicate that he wishes to abandon the traditional hopeless Fianna Fáil approach to Northern Ireland — of waiting for talks to start and then being forthcoming in some unspecified way.
If the Taoiseach wants to make progress on Northern Ireland, he must be prepared to abandon the territorial nationalism that has been the stock-in-trade of his party for the past 66 years. It is time to start building a real unity of purpose on this island — a lasting peace which will recognise that one million people see themselves as being both Irish and British at the same time and share the north east corner of this island with 500,000 people who see themselves as exclusively Irish. We should be prepared and willing to devise institutions that will accommodate both traditions on this island we share with them. There is no sign in anything the new Taoiseach has said of a willingness to grasp that, but perhaps I will be proved wrong. I am willing to wait but not for long.
I do not mean to be offensive or even controversial when I say that essentially the Fianna Fáil Party have no policies of their own. They have elevated what they call pragmatism to a form of holy writ. Indeed, the contestants for the leadership of the party spent the past three weeks trying to prove that one was more pragmatic than the other. Pragmatism is not a political creed, it is a way of avoiding trouble and decision making. It is not a way to lead a nation. A party who see pragmatism as an end in itself should not be in Government.
A pragmatic approach is fine in a country that is prosperous and stable, that has virtually no social or economic problems and that could afford to be pragmatic for a few years but Ireland is not such a country. We have a profound and deep-seated problem in the form of ongoing violence in Northern Ireland. We also have a profound and deep-seated economic and employment crisis starting us in the face over the next six to ten years. Our level of emigration is almost without parallel in Europe. Pragmatism will not solve these problems.
Apart from pragmatism, Fianna Fáil have elevated consensus with the social partners in the Programme for Economic and Social Progress as the other element of their holy writ. Naturally that suits a party who does not have their own policy but who are willing to take on board ready made interest groups who will write policy for them. The policy devised by the social partners, all of whom are employed, is not the best way of solving the problems of a country whose biggest problem is unemployment. Indeed that approach to policy making leads to the triumph of the lowest common denominator, promises now and payments later and a heavy does of fudge to fill in the gaps. That sort of decision making with which the new Taoiseach was intimately involved as Minister for Finance will not move Ireland up from Europe's second division to the first division. That is not the type of Government required by a society facing crisis. That is why we oppose this Government. Irish society require a far-sighted and decisive Government, a Government prepared to act on a profound analysis of our deep-seated problems.
The parties in Government have done no such analysis — no better evidence of that can be found than in their superficial Joint Programme for Government. The Progressive Democrats claim to be a policy driven party but their policies are based on the interests of about 6 per cent of the electorate.
I do not intend to spend much time dealing with the personal suitability of Deputy Reynolds for the Office of Taoiseach. As I said earlier, to the best of my knowledge, Deputy Reynolds is an open-minded and decent man. At his first press conference — some aspects of which I criticised — he showed a refreshing lack of rigidity in his views on a range of topics. I contend, however, that at this point we need more than just flexibility and openness. We need decisive and visionary leadership. I doubt that the combination of parties making up this Government is capable of giving us that.
We need also a Government of sound and courageous judgement. Many — both inside and outside this House — will question whether the Taoiseach's judgment has always been sound. He owes his election to the Dáil in the first instance to the 1977 Fianna Fáil election manifesto, a document he praised eloquently at the time, but subsequently admitted he had not read. He owes his promotion to ministerial office in 1979 to the former Taoiseach, Deputy Charles Haughey — in whose removal from that office he played no small part in the past few weeks. He was a member of the Government from 1979 to 1981, along with Deputy Haughey, when the grave financial crisis facing the country was openly and honestly admitted by that Government and then completely ignored by them. As a Minister in the Government Deputy Reynolds was collectively responsible for their decisions.
He was a compliant member of the Fianna Fáil Front Bench who opposed the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985. As Minister for Industry and Commerce from 1987, Deputy Reynolds was responsible for the restoration of export credit to Iraq. This was seen both at the time and afterwards as one of the more foolish financial decisions taken by any Minister in recent years. As Minister for Finance, too, Deputy Reynolds introduced the 1990 budget in which he backed away from the opportunity to complete the task of financial correction initiated by his three predecessors. Instead, his budget of that year laid the foundations for the financial problems that his successor, the present Minister for Finance, has now so irresponsibly postponed even further to 1993 in the present budget and in his renegotiation of the Programme for Economic and Social Progress.
To be fair, while he was Minister for Finance, Deputy Reynolds expressed on radio his serious concern about the financial implications of the Programme for Economic and Social Progress. He did not, however, do anything about it. His ultimate dismissal from Government came about not because he had taken a stand on a policy matter but simply because he had taken a stand on a matter of personality — the personality of the then Taoiseach. All of these errors of judgement, and I believe they were errors of judgement, do not derive from any conscious irresponsibility on the part of the Taoiseach — I do not accuse him of that — but they may arise from a slight over confidence in the capacity of short-term deal making to solve longterm problems. Regardless of the motive the price the public have had to pay for the mistakes in which the new Taoiseach played a part, right back to 1977, has been very high indeed. Let us hope there will be no more such mistakes. If there are, Fine Gael will expose them to public view, and we will be vigilant.
I invite the Taoiseach to do what he did not do in his speech today, to set out clearly the course he believes the nation should follow. I have done so in this speech. As yet, he has not done so. I urge him then to bring parliamentary democracy back to life in this House and enlist the support of all Members of the House in a committee system to enable all of us to share some of the responsibility and the power that is at present exercised privately, and often irresponsibly, by the Executive.
The days of deals with powerful interests behind closed doors are, I hope, behind us — that remains to be seen. The penchant for making a deal at all costs-whether in individual commercial matters or in bigger issues — has been the prime cause of the decay that has set into Irish public and economic life in the past number of years. It must end, it must end quickly, and if the new Taoiseach does not end it the next one will. Let us restore democratic politics to its proper role as the driving force in public affairs.
As I have said, I do not see the rather dramatic changes in personnel in the Government as indicating any change of policy. As far as the people outside this House are concerned, the people who have no jobs, the people living on both sides of the Border waiting for the boot at their door that may be the prelude to a short burst of machine gun fire that will end their lives, the people who have been on a waiting list for an operation for perhaps two or three years, and cannot get it, people who have handicapped relatives at home for whom they can no longer care but for whom there is no place, the people who live in fear in their homes in the outer suburbs of this city and other cities, wondering when they will be run down by the misnamed phenomenon of the joyrider, those are the people who really matter, not the people who have been demoted and promoted — although I am sorry for some and happy for others. So far the Taoiseach has given no indication — and certainly not in his dramatically sparse announcement — that he is prepared to do anything different to solve any of the problems experienced by those people. In this debate they are the people who matter, and in this House we should be their voice. If the Government are not prepared to offer them a voice, I can assure the House that the Opposition will do so.
