I move:
That Dáil Éireann:
conscious of the vital importance of an adequate standard of infrastructure for the modern Irish economy in order to meet the commercial and social needs of the country and recognising the current major structural deficits across a range of semi-State companies in which the Minister for Public Enterprise is the main shareholder and for which she has direct responsibility, deplores:
–her failure to convince her colleagues of the short-term nature of Aer Lingus's difficulties, the special case for direct State aid for the company and her agreement to the shedding of 2,026 jobs which will irreparably weaken the national airline;
–her failure to provide the necessary resources to ensure Iarnród Éireann provides a reliable and efficient train service for passengers;
–her failure to ensure Iarnród Éireann freight facilities are properly planned and marketed with a view to shifting freight from road to rail leading to a situation where Iarnród Éireann is planning to lay off 300 of its 600 full-time freight workforce;
–her failure to ensure that, apart from very restricted park-and-ride facilities, the long promised traffic relief measures to ease Dublin traffic chaos are put in place;
–her failure to ensure the long-promised integrated ticketing is introduced;
–her decision to delay approval of Luas with the result that it will be at least 2005 before the new light rail transport system is commissioned;
–her failure to ensure ESB power generation and grid capacity are developed and upgraded which is causing serious supply difficulties for both commercial and domestic consumers;
–her failure to ensure the ESB will be allowed to submit a preliminary bid for the purchase of eight power supply companies in Poland having spent £3 million in the preparation of the bid and which has caused significant damage to the reputation of the ESB internationally;
–her mismanagement of the Eircom floatation which has left almost 500,000 shareholders incurring considerable losses;
–her failure to put in place the necessary regulatory regime in the electricity and telecom sectors which has led directly to supply problems and companies abandoning their plans to enter these markets;
–her failure to ensure CO*2 emissions are kept within the Kyoto Protocol guidelines;
–her Department's failure to sustain the campaign against Sellafield initiated by the previous Government;
–her failure to produce a coherent strategy for the usage of natural gas from the Corrib gas field;
–her failure to ensure efficient passenger services at Dublin Airport;
–her failure to insist on the delivery of broadband services to the regions which militates against the Government's so-called policy of job regionalisation,
and calls on the Taoiseach to remove the Minister for Public Enterprise from her current office.
I wish to share my time with Deputies Quinn and Sargent. It gives me no satisfaction that the immediate target of our debate this evening is the Minister for Public Enterprise, Deputy O'Rourke. I have no hesitation in beginning my remarks by acknowledging that she is a member of an Irish political family which has given three generations of service to the State.
This motion deals with mismanagement and incompetence across a number of areas for which the Minister for Public Enterprise has primary responsibility. However, the real responsibility for the incompetence and mismanagement goes far beyond her. It starts and ends with the Taoiseach. He has presided over it. He has been prepared to do nothing about it, even when confronted with the disastrous or near collapse of the State sponsored companies for which the Minister has responsibility. The responsibility is also shared by the Government as a whole which has not only tolerated the mismanagement and incompetence in the Department of Public Enterprise, but has, by its actions and inaction, contributed to it.
It is difficult to believe now, but there were days when the very mention of State sponsored companies such as Aer Lingus, CIE and Aer Rianta evoked a sense of pride and achievement among Irish people at home and abroad. That sense of pride, sadly, has gone. The sense of achievement is gone. They are gone, not because of the workers who continue to show commitment and dedication even when the odds are stacked against them, but all has been lost because of Government incompetence and mismanagement. The Government's shareholder representative is the Minister for Public Enterprise. Never has a Minister been more inappropriately titled. She has stifled enterprise, meddled where she did not belong, failed to give direction when appropriate and floundered, flustered and blustered when faced with criticisms of her performance.
The mismanagement and incompetence have taken many forms. The Minister has been indecisive, failed to deliver, presided over major cost overruns, sometimes managed to achieve the exact opposite to what she intended, served sectional interests and ignored the future while pandering to short-term needs. However, even she could not have achieved all this on her own. She has had a massive helping hand from the Taoiseach, the Minister for Finance and the Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment.
Is it not somewhat bizarre that the Government has, for the first time in the history of the State, two Ministers whose titles include the word "Enterprise", one of whom deals with enterprise, the other with public enterprise? Yet, never has a Government been less enterprising. Never has economic success been so incompetently managed. This incompetent Government has squandered our boom.
Let me look briefly at a selection of the disasters over which the Minister has presided. I want to deal with Aer Lingus, Aer Rianta, Luas and the railways. I begin with Aer Lingus whose very future as a national airline is now threatened. With the collapse of Swissair and Sabena we see how quickly and dramatically things can change in the aviation industry. The problems of Aer Lingus, however, did not begin on 11 September, nor did they begin with the outbreak of foot and mouth disease earlier this year. The problems of Aer Lingus began when the Minister took up her appointment almost four years and six months ago.
Let us remember the situation she inherited. Passenger numbers in and out of Ireland were never higher, Aer Lingus was massively profitable and the then Minister, Deputy Alan Dukes, mandated its board to explore the possibilities of the airline entering a strategic alliance, with or without the transfer of equity, and submit proposals to the Minister as shareholder. What did the Minister for Public Enterprise do? She had no consistent or clear policy. At various stages she favoured strategic alliances, the sale of the entire Government shareholding and the sale of less than 50% of the Government shareholding. She also flip-flopped on Government aid. Initially it was ruled out; then it was ruled in, provided the European Union agreed. She came to the House and asked us to enact the Aer Lingus Bill, 2000, which provided the legislative framework for an initial public offering. She appointed the necessary advisers and committed the Government to the same high fees she had already paid in the case of Eircom, but she wrecked any real possibility of a successful IPO by saying that she would, "follow the Eircom model", a model which had already left almost 500,000 Irish people suffering serious financial loss. Did she seriously believe that anyone would ever again invest their hard earned money in anything in which she was involved after that disaster?
Perhaps the most humiliating episode in the sorry Aer Lingus saga was the attempt made by the Minister, and personally by the Taoiseach, to persuade the European Commission to be helpful. I cannot recall any occasion since we joined the European Union almost 30 years ago where an Irish approach was so glaringly and decisively rejected. This can hardly have come as a huge surprise when one remembers how arrogantly and insensitively the Minister for Finance, with the backing of the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste, gave Brussels the two fingers when it sought to bring us into line with European economic policy. Why should Brussels play ball on any issue with an Irish Government which so publicly, repeatedly and arrogantly refused to co-operate on overall economic policy?
Let us also remember the damage done to our reputation in Europe by the extraordinary cronyism in attempting to appoint Mr. Hugh O'Flaherty to a European institution. The Tánaiste may think that nobody would remember that after a few weeks, as she once infamously said. The powers that be in Brussels still remember it and Ireland continues to pay the price.
The failure of Aer Lingus is not simply a failure on the part of the Minister, Deputy O'Rourke. It is a failure on the part of the Taoiseach, the Tánaiste and the Minister for Finance. It is a stark illustration of Government incompetence and mismanagement. So much for Aer Lingus.
Let us look briefly at Aer Rianta. Anyone who has used Dublin Airport recently will understand why it has been ranked number 39 of 48 airports surveyed by the International Air Transport Association. What did the Minister set out to do when she was appointed? She said she wanted to preside over the development of Dublin Airport so that it would become a first class facility with the potential to become a European hub airport. In the four and a half years that she has been in office, she has presided over a slide into chaos and Aer Rianta is in dispute with most of its customers. It does not know whether the Minister will allow competition at the airport. It does not know whether she will allow a new terminal to be built by someone other than Aer Rianta. In general, it is facing the same uncertainty that has brought Aer Lingus to its knees.
I will give a small but extraordinary example of Aer Rianta's current activities outside Dublin. For many years, Aer Rianta has provided catering for the castles in County Clare, whose flagship is Bunratty Castle. These banquets have been, and should be for the future, one of the main tourist attractions in the mid-west, especially for the American market, but what happens when the cold winds blow through tourism, particularly from the United States? Aer Rianta announces that it is pulling out of the catering contract by the end of the year and the castles will have to find somebody else to do the job. This was a profitable activity from which Aer Rianta made £250,000 a year. This is like bowing to some kind of ideological god in the consultancy world who says that Aer Rianta should pull out of all core activity. Since Deputy Healy-Rae stopped it from pulling out of the hotels in Parknasilla, Killarney and elsewhere, it decided to pull out of catering at Bunratty Castle, despite making a profit.
This is Aer Rianta as presided over by Fianna Fáil which has always said that it does not want to give foreign airlines too much access to Shannon Airport because they are inclined to reduce or eliminate their services when times get bad. What happens now, however, when times are bad? Aer Rianta, of which the Government is the sole shareholder, decides to pull out of the major tourism activity in the region. How can the Government expect the private sector to maintain the tourism sector if the first thing it does when things get rough is pull out of profitable enterprises? If the Minister has any interest in the mid-west, she should do something about this issue before it is too late.
When the rainbow Government left office in June 1997, there was a ready-to-roll, fully costed and EU supported plan for Luas. If it had been followed, the hard-pressed people of Dublin would now be travelling on the Luas system. A similar scheme in Montpellier in France, the planning for which started at the same time as Dublin, is already up and running. The people of that French city can now travel to and from work on their light rail system. The Minister, however, could not leave well enough alone. For no reason, other than it was a rainbow Government project, she decided that it had to be reviewed, looked at by consultants and, in her own memorable term, "re-energised". The end result is plain for all to see. The only yard of track laid after four and a half years has been the toy track on Merrion Square, the latest political gimmick by a desperate Government. In the process, incidentally, hundreds of people were deprived of parking spaces and traffic congestion in the area has increased. Thank God it is being removed today. If the Minister wants to play with toy trains, she should invest in a good set and play with them at home, or write to Santa Claus.
