I want to make it clear that I support the Labour Party's motion of no confidence in the Minister for Justice and Minister for Communications, although I should point out that if the Labour Party had got it right last Thursday, we would have even more reason to vote no confidence in this Minister as we would know more of that he has in mind in relation to broadcasting. In that regard it is my belief that there is only one clear and consistent element in the policy of this Minister. He wants to do irreparable damage to RTE by hook or by crook, but there the clarity ends. He is not sure how to go about this infamous and vengeful enterprise. In the space of a couple of weeks, he has come out with one scheme after another, each one worse than the one that went before it. So far the Minister has twice been publicly supported by the junior Government party, only to be denounced within the space of a couple of days. It will soon be time for the cock to crow a third time and I wonder if we will hear a third denunciation by the Progressive Democrats. Will they even be here tonight? Will any of them be here tonight or have the mould breakers finally turned to jelly?
The Government clearly have no confidence in this Minister. He has been accused publicly of cutting corners. Ministers have told him privately — some not so privately — that he has got it wrong. It is now commonplace to hear Fianna Fáil backbenchers, Progressive Democrat Senators and even Progressive Democrat spokesmen in exile publicly denouncing what this Minister is doing. There are divisions in the Government and there are divisions in Fianna Fáil about what this Minister is attempting to do. Everything he has touched so far has gone wrong. This latest and most naked act of revenge has gone wrong. It has been a disaster for the Government, a disaster that will dog them for the rest of their lives, however long or short that may be. If Members of the Government have learned anything at all from this fiasco it must surely be that they need to read very carefully and with very great suspicion anything that this Minister puts before the Cabinet. They will have learned that they should approach everything he says and does with distrust in their hearts and alarm bells ringing in their ears. They should refuse to accept anything from him that is not written. In those circumstances, we have to ask, how they can possibly continue to work with him.
Look at the record. This Minister has not tackled in any real sense the many problems that beset our prison system. He has not dealt adequately with the many problems of HIV -positive prisoners. He has clearly failed to understand the flexibility offered by the design of Wheatfield Prison and he is not using that prison in a way that will most effectively deal with the problems in the prison system. He has failed totally to understand the need to improve management and decision-making structures in the Garda Síochána, in spite of the fact that the Garda Representative Association, the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors and senior Garda officers have consistently offered him pertinent and well-considered advice.
The Minister has utterly failed to explain his extraordinary action in obliging the RTE authority to sell Cablelink to Telecom Éireann, an under-bidder among a group of potential buyers, all of whom thought they were on a level playing pitch. It is clear that other members of the Government shared, at least temporarily, the real concerns we have on this side of the House with the Minister's unprecedented approach to the issue. It has been a very curious approach. The Irish taxpayer loses out because of what the Minister has done. The Government have left themselves open to the possibility of legal claims by the prime bidder, who have already said they are considering legal action. If they were misled, other bidders may take the same view and consider taking the same course. If the primary bidder had been allowed to purchase Cablelink, the Irish economy would have a net addition of £100 million of foreign investment rather than a simple transfer between one State company and another, which is what is on the cards at the moment.
Telecom Éireann do not seem to have got a great deal so far out of this. The interest cost to Telecom Éireann of this purchase is reported to be about £4.5 million. Their share of the profits of Cablelink is reported to be about £1.2 million. Telecom Éireann already have substantial borrowings, guaranteed by the State, and here we are going to add more to that with further exposure to the taxpayer.
The activities of the IDA and even CTT have been damaged because the Minister has ensured that while there is an apparently competitive bidding situation, he is going to step in, completely distort the whole procedure and decide, for reasons he has not explained, that some under-bidder is going to be the one who wins out. That is going to damage the confidence of outside business interests in the way the Irish economy and substantial sectors of it are being handled.
Indeed members of the Government seem to share these very serious concerns. The Minister for Industry and Commerce went to the trouble of publicly vetoing the decision made by the Minister pending an examination by the Fair Trade Commission. The same Minister for Industry and Commerce later, and just as publicly, backed down from that position, allowed the sale to go ahead and covered himself by announcing a set of conditions that he surely could have written out for himself in the beginning, before going to the extraordinary lengths of publicly vetoing a decision by a colleague. The Minister for Industry and Commerce has not explained his action at all, and the rest of us here are forced to ask if agreement on the sale of Cablelink to Telecom was the price the Progressive Democrats had to pay for getting concessions on the Broadcasting Bill. If that was so, they have paid out and used up their political credit for nothing since it is very clear that Fianna Fáil would have extracted the same meagre, unsatisfactory concessions from the Minister if the Progressive Democrats had kept their mouths shut.
This is the Minister who wanted to retain for himself the power to issue broadcasting licences, but that went wrong. He was forced to back down from that and was obliged to set up a commission. This is the Minister who sold the virtues of MMDS. Like many thousands of people around the country, I got a very glossy brochure in the post one day, with lovely pictures of the landscape of Ireland, saying how MMDS was going to resolve all the problems. What happens now? The Minister is saying that MMDS has to be supplemented by UHF.
Everything this Minister has done so far has gone wrong and all the indications are that what he is still planning to do will go wrong also. This, for example, is the Minister who wants to deliver TV3. I am told he is now advising some of the potential bidders that they should concentrate on Dublin and the east coast for at least three years. Why? Does the Minister believe that TV3 will be uneconomic or that it will not work, or, has he got some mad scheme up his sleeve for a TV4?
This Minister would have a hand in delivering on Fianna Fáil's 1987 promise of Teilifís na Gaeltachta. That has gone wrong. Nothing has happened, yet the Minister should know that there is a national campaign on this issue. It is very well informed, it is very well researched and there is now no belief either in his ability or in the Government's ability to understand the real meaning of the campaign or to deliver on their promise. The Minister has not admitted that the current shape of his plans for TV3 cut directly across the possible options for Irish language TV broadcasting. That is either because he is making a vain attempt to hide the fact or, perhaps, he simply does not understand it.
He has failed to do the two jobs he was given in this Cabinet. It is time for this House to recognise that. It is time for the Government and the Taoiseach to act on what they already know and to take this Minister off the playing pitch completely.