It is an intimidating experience to follow the eloquence and advocacy of Deputy Sheehan. It is only slightly less intimidating to follow him than to be at the other end of his sights as the Minister present is, as indeed I have been on occasions. I can feel sorry for the Minister when that power and eloquence is directed at him. I know, of course, that one has to be strong to survive in south-west Cork and both the Minister and the Deputy have shown a great capacity to survive.
Since Deputy Walsh is here let me say that he knows perfectly well that most of us who have been involved with agriculture in one way or another for a great many years have a certain kind of affection for him and wish him extremely well. As a former Minister for Agriculture, may I wish him well but I predict that he will have a great many sleepless nights both at home and in Brussels and I am not sure which will be worse.
A week ago I looked at this famous Fianna Fáil dream ticket. One member on the ticket is now Taoiseach but the other, as is the case on so many of these occasions, seems to have evaporated — nobody is talking about the other member on the dream ticket, the present Minister for Finance. I predicted at that stage that the dream ticket would turn into a nightmare. It already has: it has been a nightmare for the former Taoiseach, for eight Cabinet Ministers and a Chief Whip, all of whom have lost office. That is the first fruit of this dream ticket which has so quickly turned into a nightmare.
The pundits would all say that if the new Taoiseach were to make fundamental changes in his Government, not to speak of the style of Government, this was the best and possibly the only moment he could do it. They may very well be right. We all know that the rooms, corridors and restaurants of this House are buzzing this evening with all kinds of speculation. We will see more of it in the media. I have no doubt that tomorrow's newspapers will be full of every kind of expert analysis, examination and interpretation of what the Taoiseach has done, why some people are included and others are not. I wonder, however, if they will make what seems to be a straightforward point — simply that the choices made by this Taoiseach are, in a very direct way, an eloquent comment on the choices made by his predecessor and that the deletions may be an even more eloquent comment on the choices of his predecessor and may be an explanation of some of the history of what has been happening in the Fianna Fáil Party for the past two years. All of us — certainly Members on this side of the House — will conclude this evening that a discernible group within Fianna Fáil have now moved in and another discernible group have moved out. If the matter were not so important I would be tempted to make other comparisons, but I would be moved to say that the pantomime horse had changed around and what used to be the tail is now the head and what used to be the head is now the rump.
I wonder what that new head has to say to us because that is really the most important question before us now. The answer, quite honestly, is that we do not have very much of an idea. We do not have very much upon which to base a view on what this head has in store for us in terms of management of the economy, a small but very important part of a Government's job or on what is in store for us in the way of a new approach to our fundamental problems of unemployment, inflation and fitting our economy to compete in Europe and to employ more people. Will we have something that has been overdue for a very long time, that is, a Government that get hold of the basic fact that in order to create greater employment — to provide jobs for more young people who are coming out of our schools, colleges and universities — we will have to produce goods and services more competitively than other countries? The Government have to recognise that no amount of short term expedients, no amount of agencies, no amount of training schemes and no amount of the old illusionary politics of creative schemes that do not tackle the real issue of competitive production of goods and services in Ireland will sort out our problem.
As I said, it is very difficult to know just what to make of the new Government. The Taoiseach has not put very much on the public record in relation to what he thinks about any of our problems. We have a rough idea of what the new Taoiseach thinks about competition policy — he has been Minister for Industry and Commerce; we have a fair idea of what he thinks, on the surface anyway, about running the nation's finances — he was Minister for Finance; and if we reach back far enough in our memories, we have some idea what he thinks about transport policy — after all, he was Minister for Industry and Transport at one time. Mind you, I wonder whether the new Taoiseach would now repeat something he did in 1980, when he went to Brittany and offered himself as a hostage to try to free an airplane? I doubt if he would now offer himself as a hostage for anything, although it may be that the Fianna Fáil Party have offered him as a hostage to fortune in the future.
If one considers the other Members nominated for appointment to Cabinet, there is not much evidence of the stand they could be expected to take. One has to look at the record to find out what views they hold, and, in all conscience, that record is very mixed.
The present Taoiseach brought three budgets before the House — in 1989, 1990 and 1991. It would be fair to say that the 1989 budget did not bear much of his imprint because it was largely put together by his predecessor, Ray MacSharry, before he went to Brussels. The budget of 1990, however, although it was not very spectacular, would be the most recent occasion on which a Government seemed to have any real grip on what they wanted to do in setting priorities in all the main policy areas while respecting the financial constraints they faced. That could not be said of the 1991 budget. I spoke about that budget at some length this night last week and I shall not go into it again, but I shall say that the 1991 budget employed sleight of hand to give the impression that the Government were managing to deal with the country's financial problems when in fact they were doing no such thing. The 1991 budget started off as a juggling act that concealed increased Government borrowings and ended up not even as good as it had seemed in the beginning. It was clear that the Government of the time had given up any real attempt to keep control of our financial destiny while fixing priorities in social and economic policy.
It is difficult to know what to make of the 1992 budget, but we cannot blame the present Taoiseach too much for it because he was taken out of the game before the final budget decisions were made. However, it is still fair to say — because the Minister for Finance is still in place — that this year's budget was another very worrying phase in the retreat from any real attempt to respect the financial constraints imposed upon us, and that does not give me any great confidence the Government will find a way through those financial constraints to deal with our economic and social problems.
The Minister for Finance has no great record in financial matters. He allows the idea that he has been an accountant to circulate but he has not been an accountant — he has been a book-keeper, all right. It is a curious irony that the Fianna Fáil Party, which complained for so many years about a book-keeping approach to national accounts, now has a book-keeper as Minister for Finance.
This year the Minister for Finance will not succeed in balancing the books any better than his predecessor did last year. If the present Minister for Finance had a reputation for anything, it is a reputation for conciliation — which is the best word I can find for what he seems to be good at. Last year, for example, he conciliated his way into the Programme for Economic and Social Progress, a programme the country could not afford even at the time. He then became Minister for Finance and had to conciliate his way out of that agreement.
I was wryly amused this morning to read a newsletter from one of the organisations that participated in the deal, which now claim that the position to which they have retreated in the Minister's latest conciliation is actually a gain. They have decided that they do not want to go on strike or to take industrial action but they are trying to pretend the position to which they have retreated between the beginning of last year and the beginning of this year is in some way a gain for their members, and, indeed, a gain for the children who are subject to their members' profession. It is not a gain; it is a deal that should never have been struck in the way it was.
As I said, the ability of the present Minister for Finance seems to be that as a councillor. The only difficulty is that whenever he conciliates a problem it ends up costing us more money, and if he does not have the money today then he will do as he did in this year's budget, he will put off the expenditure to a future year and let deferred expenditure build up.
I am appalled to consider what the country faces next year in deferred commitments. There are all the deferred Programme for Economic and Social Progress commitments, some of which have been deferred for a third or fourth year; there is the problem of a deferred £200 million VAT at the point of entry on imports from other EC countries which has not been dealt with but has been put off until next year; and there is the potential problem with deposit interest retention tax which has not been dealt with this year but has been put off until next year. It does not require any great imagination or alarm to deduce that there could be a sum of £400 million in deferred payments to be dealt with in the 1993 budget. The Minister for Finance himself admitted in the House on budget day that he does not know what he will do about that and hopes something will come out of discussions with the Commission. That is the record of the Minister for Finance, that is what we have to base our hopes on for future Government financial policy.
The new Minister for Social Welfare, Deputy McCreevy, has my very best wishes, and I mean that sincerely. He has stayed out of office — perhaps by choice at times — for quite a long time and now finds himself at the Cabinet table. He has great common sense and I hope he will continue the progress made in recent years in simplifying the social welfare system, in making it a little more responsive to the needs of the people for whom it is to serve and ensuring that it does that efficiently and with compassion.
God knows there is a need for compassion. Very recently I came across a constituent of the Minister's and of mine, a widow, who was in receipt of a child dependant allowance for twin sons who were at college. Early last year she asked the Department how long their entitlement would last. About two months later she got a reply saying that entitlement would continue until some date in October last year. A week before Christmas she got a letter from the same Department saying that since her two sons had turned 21 last February there was an overpayment and that she now owed them £1,250. Her widow's pension is £53 per week and they were going to deduct £5 a week from her pension to recover the overpayment. It was to take five years for that women to repay an overpayment that arose only because the Department who had all the information could not get it right. It was only when I contacted the Department that they agreed to pay the cost of their own mistake. That should not happen. A Minister for Social Welfare should have as one of his ambitions to make sure that that kind of thing could not happen.
The Minister's predecessor, the new Minister for the Marine, Deputy Woods, achieved some very useful things in simplifying that system. For his pains he was described by one of our scribes, one of the experts in everything, as a technocrat. That, it seems is a very bad thing to be. It is a bad thing to be a technocrat and to make sure that a system of administration works in the way it was intended and produces benefits for the people it is intended to benefit, the Press do not like technocrats. I know for a fact that the ordinary people would far sooner have a technocrat who gets the job done and makes the system work sufficiently on their behalf than a glamorous chancer who gets away with fooling them up to the eyeballs without doing them any good at all. Yet we have an example on the other side of the House, now on the back benches, of a person who was a glamorous chancer for about 20 years, the man who gets the rave reviews from the press, whereas the man who does a job for real people, a job that matters to them in their pockets, in their jobs, in their homes gets labelled with this dreadful label "technocrat". My constituents would rather be served by a technocrat who gets the job done than by a glamourous chancer who will only spend their money.
The Minister for Tourism, Transport and Communications is to be congratulated on her return to the Cabinet. The strike in RTE has produced some very strange results. The 6 o'clock news on television this evening recalled some highlights of the Minister's career. There were two or three clips, one of a function the Minister attended on her return to her constituency last November having been fired and there was no soundtrack on that.
The second clip was an earlier one in which she gave what many people regarded as a very masterly, ambiguous and loaded speech to warm up the crowd for her Taoiseach at the last Fianna Fáil Árd-Fheis. I am glad to see that she is back in Cabinet, if there has to be a Cabinet of that complexion. I hope that Minister will give her earliest attention to resolving and dispelling some of the confusion that her predecessor in that Department caused over the last two years, by his dithering about the status of Shannon Airport as Ireland's transatlantic gateway. The Minister, Deputy Brennan sowed alarm, confusion and unfounded optimism throughout the country by trying to be all things to all men, by making ambiguous statements and by failing to do the one thing any Minister involved in his area should have done, to simply read the terms of the Bilateral Agreement between Ireland and the US on transatlantic air services. If he had done that he would have been able to resist the siren songs of American airlines who say what they are going to do without ever asking their Government to negotiate on their behalf, and he would not have fallen into the kind of trap he has fallen into over the last two years.
The appointment of Deputy John O'Connell as Minister for Health is something of a surprise. It is hard to know what to expect of the Minister, because we do not know much about his record on the issues with which he will be dealing. During the course of the 1989 election he was reported to have said that he saw nothing wrong with people being on trolleys in hospital corridors and he went on to explain to those of us who apparently missed the simple point, that a trolley was simply a bed with wheels. I know that most of the patients in hospitals would take a very much less relaxed view of it than that. Perhaps the Minister has more to say about the quality of our health services, about how they are organised and about whether we get value for money from the health services. I wonder if the Minister believes, in the present system of managing our health services where nobody in a public hospital anywhere in this country has any control over what the hospital does and very few people have any idea of what hospital procedures cost. Has the Minister any idea about how to get better value from our health service by giving more of the management of the health services to the people who deliver the services and allow them to schedule how they do their business without it being done for them by two parallel bureaucracies, the Department of Health and the health boards.
I searched through the record of the House and could find no record of the new Minister for Health giving any views that he might have on, for example, family planning and contraception. He was silent during the debate we had in 1985 and I am not aware that he said anything about it since. It is an issue he will have to deal with along with the wider issue of our campaign against AIDS which must be dealt with. I would like to see the new Minister for Health come in and tell the House honestly that the problem of AIDS is a much deeper, much more fundamental and much more worrying problem than it is being presented as at the moment, and that the issue of who can buy condoms, at what age and where, has very little to do with the problem of AIDS. I would like to see the Government separating those two issues and not trying to cover up their faint heartedness in relation to the issue of condoms by linking it unnecessarily in an unfair and stupid way with the much bigger problem of AIDS. I am not at all sure that the new Minister for Health will do much to get over the conservativism and faint heartedness that is legendary in his party on this and on related issues.
We have a new Minister for Justice in Deputy Flynn. I wish him well on his return to Cabinet. Many people in this House will say that he displayed a degree of conviction last November and adherence to principle that perhaps surprised some of us. He is to be commended on that and I welcome his return to the Cabinet, but I wonder what we can expect in the way of law reform from a Minister for Justice who has shown himself to be a deeply conservative person. The last major legislation in which he was involved as Minister for the Environment was the Local Government Act last year. That was a restricted, conservative Act and if that was carried through this House with conviction by the Minister, then I am not at all sure that we can expect any major departure in terms of law reform.
What does the new Minister for Justice feel about the changes that are being proposed on our laws of libel, for example? Has he any proposals or conviction on the necessity to provide here a procedure for the re-examination of doubtful verdicts which have gone all the way through our courts? That system exists in the UK, although we sometimes forget it. It is an administration we have loved to criticise in recent years, but we do not have such a system here, although I think there is agreement in this House that we need something of that kind. Are we to see that kind of reform of the law pertaining to our courts system from this Minister for Justice? Are we to see any reforms in the law, for example, in relation to marital property, from this very conservative Minister? I would look forward to being surprised on these matters by the Minister but I am not all sure that I will be.
The legacy is such that the new Minister for the Environment, Deputy Michael Smith, starts off with a big disadvantage. The last reform of local government is an albatros hanging around the neck of the new Minister. If he is to do anything real and substantial about local government reform he will first have to set aside huge sections of the Act which went through this House last year and decide to devolve real decision-making powers to local authorities. He will also have to grasp the one nettle which the Barrington Commission were told not even to look at — the financing of local authorities. Rumour has it that Deputy Flynn when Minister for the Environment flirted with the idea of reforming local government finances four or five times during his career as Minister. The new Minister will be able to do nothing in relation to reforming local government and promoting local democracy and the principle of subsidiarity — which our former Taoiseach suddenly discovered on the road to Maastricht — unless and until he takes his courage in his hands and persuades the Government to do something fundamental about financing local authorities and giving them access to and responsibility for tax revenue of their own. Until we do that we are wasting our time talking about local government reform or any kind of local democracy.
I said I looked forward to being surprised by the Minister for Justice. I looked forward also to being surprised by the Minister for Labour, Deputy Brian Cowen. He has been remarkable to me only for being what I might call the chief vulgarian of the Fianna Fáil backbenchers and the heckler-in-chief when they all get together in a group. If he is to make an impact as Minister for Labour he will have to show a deal more delicacy and finesse than he has so far shown in this House. There is an enormous job to be done. It is a problem that will cause a great deal of worry, not just to politicians and members of Government but to ordinary people. I refer to finding alternative employment over the whole midlands areas when Bord na Móna have finished with the cutaway bogs.
That is an immense problem and only a very small start has been made in the consideration of it. The Minister for Energy recently published the report of a committee which he set up over a year ago. The committee did a very good job and produced what can only be regarded as the very first outline of the problem. It would be churlish to go into it now; there will be another day. The committee went beyond themselves in suggesting that one of the things we might do would be to build new cluster village in the midlands where new people would go to live. That is not the problem. We have to find opportunities for employment for the people already there who will lose their jobs in Bord na Móna and the ESB, never mind any new people who might move into the area. That is a problem this Government should begin to address. It is so complex and has so many facets that it will be quite a while before we can even begin to feel we have mapped out a strategy. The Minister for Energy should listen to the new Minister for Labour, who should be able to tell him the reality that is facing people throughout the midlands who see their only future as being on the dole at a fairly young age in an area where there is very little chance of alternative employment.
There appear to be four committed Gaeilgeoirí in the Cabinet. If I were to do the normal political thing I would lapse into Irish at this stage. I will not do so because when I speak Irish I prefer to speak it all the way through. I do not like tokenism. I am glad to see the four Gaeilgeoirí in the Cabinet and I hope we will see a new realisation and that they will do a lot more for the language than did the last Government or previous Governments. If they are to be serious, they must do one thing above all. There are vested interests involved in this and it will be an uncomfortable thing to do. Until we fundamentally change the way we teach Irish to our children we will be wasting time and resources in doing what Governments over the years have tried to do. The way we teach Irish to our children is an absolute scandal. It is pointless and it creates resentment and resistance, even among children whose family background is militantly pro-Gaeilge. I have seen it myself, as well all have. Unless and until we decide to begin to teach children Irish in something like the way they learn their family's mother tongue when they are growing up, we are wasting our resources. All the talk about the language from the current Taoiseach or former Taoisigh or anybody else will be so much wasted hot air.
It is traditional to wish a new Government well. I wish this new Government well and I hope they will be successful at their jobs. There is one fair prediction: although they will get credit for a number of things they will do, this House will never say unanimously that it approves of what they are at. That is the duty of Government versus the duty of Opposition. I should like to see this Government do one thing. It is the key to everything we have to decide. Fianna Fáil have not decided on it and I do not think the Progressive Democrats have decided on it either. We must decide to stop building up commitments and debts that pre-empt the revenue we produce every year. The current Taoiseach knows something about this and I hope the new Minister for Finance is awake enough to find out about it. What annoyed me most as Minister for Finance — and it has been something that has worried me ever since I began to take any kind of interest in how we run a country or a society — was the frustration of seeing our people produce goods and services and of having £2.5 billion of tax revenue taken away with not a single thing the Government of the day could do to use that money constructively to deal with today's problems and to provide for tomorrow's. That is what overspending, budget deficits and Exchequer borrowing do for us. They cripple our ability to use the resources we now produce to deal with the problems we have today and foresee for tomorrow. If the Government can add anything to what has been lost since 1987 they will have done something worth while. The most important thing that happened over the past 20 years took place between 1982 and 1987 — and it took longer than that for it to stick when the country woke up to the scandal of limiting ourselves in that way, acquiring some passing acquaintance with economic common sense which was thrown away in 1990 and 1991. It is time the Government endeavoured to retrieve it.
