I wish to raise with the Minister the extremely worrying reports in today's edition of The Irish Times that public money was allocated to Ministers' constituencies. It is reported that £2.1 million in public money was earmarked in last week's budget for a variety of projects on what Civil Service sources describe as a “political list” drawn up by key Government Ministers.The reports state that, according to sources, these budget sweeteners were included at the behest of Ministers.According to the evidence, Labour Ministers, who have a direct line to the Minister for Finance, have fared much better than their Fine Gael and Democratic Left colleagues.
The evidence supporting these claims is manifestly clear. The Minister for Finance, Deputy Quinn, has been given £390,000 for his constituency, which includes £40,000 for the Cambridge Boy's Football Club at Irishtown. The Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs, Deputy Spring, has been given £200,000, £100,000 of which is for an athletics track in Castleisland. I note that there are no grants for south Kerry. The Minister of State to the Government, Deputy Rabbitte, and the Minister for Equality and Law Reform, Deputy Taylor, have managed to get £50,000 for St. Mark's Football Club. That is not the end of the list. I have no doubt all these organisations are worthy of support but I am worried about the criteria used in the selection of these projects. When the Ministers were in Opposition they often referred to the need to apply objective criteria when allocating resources to projects. This point also arose in the context of the allocation of national lottery funds.
I welcomed the consensus which was emerging on the need to end this type of stroke politics and genuinely thought we were moving in this direction. Given the high moral ground stance adopted by the Government, I was greatly taken aback to hear about these political strokes, the most blatant form of clientism we have seen and which cost more than £2 million. It is clear that the Government has set up a slush fund in an effort to buy votes in various constituencies on the basis that it is seen to deliver on the ground.
However, I hope the Minister will not use the argument that the same thing happened in the past. I know it did but I have never seen such an obvious example of stroke politics during my time in Dáil Éireann. I have never agreed with this kind of politics, which does not win votes among the public who are cynical about this type of dependency culture.
I wish to put a number of questions to the Minister. There is a large community in Whitechurch, Ballyboden, in my constituency. This area has a large population of young children, many of whose parents are on low incomes or are unemployed. For some time St. Joseph's Youth Club, Ballyboden, has been trying to get financial support to build a sports hall to cater for the recreational needs of local children. The miserly sum of £10,000 which it received from the national lottery under the previous Government — obviously my lobbying did not work — was not adequate, and even though it has raised additional funding it still does not have enough money to proceed with the work. Is this project less deserving than those in the Ministers' constituencies? If objective criteria were applied in the allocation of funding, how would this project compare with others? Why were the projects in the Ministers' constituencies not funded under the national lottery, as happens in the case of all other local sports and recreational projects? I have no problem with heritage or cultural projects which are of national significance.Were these projects pulled out of the hat merely because they had a ministerial tag on them? It is time this type of behaviour in Government was ended once and for all.
