Dáil Éireann debate -
Tuesday, 8 Oct 2024

I move:

That Dáil Éireann notes:

- the wasteful spending of public funds by this Government;

- the exposure of further waste of public money in recent weeks on a €336,000 bike shed and a €1,400,000 security hut; and

- the cost overrun related to modular homes for Ukrainians, and the debacle of the new children's hospital becoming the most expensive in the world;

condemns the further wasteful spending announced in Budget 2025 in respect of the allocation of €9,000,000 for phone pouches;

further notes:

- that, in her final report on the provision of Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) in the State, the Inspector of Mental Health Services concluded that she could not provide an assurance to all parents in Ireland that their children have access to a safe, effective and evidence-based mental health service;

- that there are now 3,681 children compared to 2,115 children waiting on a first-time appointment with CAMHS since this Government was formed, and likewise a further 18,368 children waiting for a first-time psychology appointment; and

- that the additional allocation for 2025 for mental health set out in the Government's Budget is an insufficient €16 million; and

mandates the Government to end the further waste of public money on mobile phone pouches, reverse that decision and invest this badly needed funding in mental health services and schools.

As the Sinn Féin spokesperson on mental health, the last thing I thought I would be doing is talking about the expenditure of €9 million on phone pouches for children. The Government and the Minister have dressed up this vanity project as a mental health issue. Over the past five years I have had comprehensive engagement with parents, young people, stakeholders and international experts, who inform me on the failures in mental health care and how best they would solve these problems. I can honestly say, with my hand on my heart, that not once did any of these groups ever mention phone pouches.

Let me put this in the context of budget 2025. In budget 2025, the Government announced only €16 million in new measures for mental health. This is nowhere near good enough. Out of the €16 million, less than €3 million was for CAMHS. When we compare that to the €9 million that will be spent on phone pouches, it is a kick in the teeth for the parents of children misdiagnosed, mistreated, and lost in CAMHS, as outlined in the report by Dr. Maskey and the Mental Health Commission. This is also a kick in the teeth for the 3,681 children waiting for their first appointment with CAMHS and the 504 children who are waiting longer than a year for an appointment.

Could the Minister imagine being a child in mental health duress waiting for more than a year? Does she honestly think an amount of less than €3 million can fix the crisis? Does she also think that €9 million on phone pouches is a good investment? What planet is the Government on? The Government must be living in a different reality to parents and children failed by the State.

Families for Reform of CAMHS, which has more than 1,200 members, has stated that the decision to dress up phone pouches as mental health support is incredibly triggering. It went on to say that it encapsulates the level of disingenuousness and gaslighting it has found itself constantly up against in the past 18 months since it was formed. The group was formed out of desperation because of the lack of services for their children. Its response came on foot of a Fianna Fáil video that said you should never play politics with the mental health of young people. That is an indication of the neck of this Government. That is exactly what it has done. This is not a game. Children's lives are at stake here. The ability of a child to reach their full potential is at stake. Dressing up a vanity project as a mental health support is disingenuous.

Spending €9 million on phone pouches is another example of a culture of wasting public money by this Government. The waste of taxpayers' money by this Government is indefensible. The latest splurge comes on the back of the most expensive hospital in the world, costing upwards of €2.2 billion; the €336,000 bike shed; the €1.4 million security hut; and the €442,000 forked out for modular homes that were supposed to cost €200,000. This week I also found out that the HSE was fined €4.3 million for not paying bills on time. That is without even mentioning the €14 billion in Apple tax payments the Government did not want in the first place. You could not make it up.

Today, the Government has a chance to do the right thing. It has a chance to rectify its mistake of spending €9 million on phone pouches. It also has a chance to put the €9 million into proper mental health supports for our most vulnerable citizens. That is what real leaders would do. That is what a real Government that is in touch with ordinary workers and families would do. Will the Minister withdraw her amendment and support Sinn Féin's motion, which mandates the Government to end the further waste of public money on mobile phone pouches? I call on the Government to reverse that decision and invest the badly needed sum of €9 million in funding in mental health services and schools. That would see our children being given every single chance to reach their full potential.

It beggars belief that at a time when schools and school leaders are pleading for additional resources but are still reliant on voluntary contributions from parents, this Government chooses to allocate €9 million to phone pouches. It is despicable that the Government then attempts to hide behind the cloak of mental health to justify its decision, particularly when we look at its track record in failing to deliver for mental health.

When the Government took office in 2020, there were just over 2,000 children waiting on first-time appointments in CAMHS. That figure now stands at more than 3,500, an increase of 74%. When the Government took office, there were more than 220 children left waiting more than a year for a CAMHS appointment. The number now stands at more than 500, an increase of 126%. In 2020, more than 9,500 children were waiting on psychological appointments. In 2024, the number is more than 18,000 children. A European study identified Ireland as the hardest country in the EU to receive mental health treatment.

Primary and post-primary schools have been underfunded for years. Seven out of ten schools ran a deficit at some stage in the past 12 months. Heating costs are up by more than 37%. Electricity costs are up by 35%. Insurance costs are up by 19%. There were cuts to the primary school book grant scheme and the summer programme for capitation for mainstream schools. The school grants calendar changes like the weather.

This spend is indefensible and it must be reversed immediately. This money could be better invested in capitation, DEIS supports, ICT, minor works, ancillary services, and special educational needs. The list goes on and on. These were the issues parents and school leaders were extremely vocal about, yet the Government has chosen to ignore them. In response to criticism, the Government then said it was another one-off measure. The Minister should stop for one minute and think of the good this money could do if it were invested in NEPS, for example, and the positive long-term impact it would have on students and their educational outcomes.

It is hard to keep track of the chronic waste of money, not just by this Government but by successive governments over the years, from bike sheds to security huts, iodine tablets, ghost airports, millennium clocks, e-voting machines, etc. Then we have the overspends. We have the most expensive hospital in the world, modular housing, and the flood defence system in Athlone, which now stands at more than €27.5 million and is not due to be completed until next year. They are in the past. This allocation is not. This is one that can and must be undone.

The Government must reconsider its decision to allocate €9 million in public funds to mobile phone pouches in schools. All schools I know, and all schools throughout the country, have very good mobile phone policies that have been bought into by students and teachers. Students understand that if they are caught with their phone on them in school, it will be confiscated. They adhere to the rules.

There was no consultation with schools, unions or any of the stakeholders on how €9 million should be spent. I have been in contact with some people who have mobile phone pouches in their school. The students are already finding ways to circumvent them. Some put their old phone into the pouch. Others have a smart watch on their arm anyway and they get all their messages that way. One very creative student has a magnet that opens the pouch. They get around them, and it is a terrible waste of money.

Prior to when Fianna Fáil crashed the economy, the school I taught in had a counsellor. That is what we need to see back in schools - counsellors who will meet students and talk to them about issues of concern and deal with them when, perhaps, they are self-harming and so on. The service was invaluable and it was missed when the funding was cut after the economy crashed. At the time, it was funded through the school completion programme.

Parents have asked me how many sensory rooms could be funded by €9 million. As it is, the grants for sensory rooms are insufficient and schools must fundraise. This money would make such a difference to them. How many additional SNAs could we have? How many additional special education teachers? There are so many different ways this money could be much better spent than on mobile phone pouches.

I met a mother in my constituency at the weekend. Out of respect for her and her family, I will limit the details I put on the record.

This woman has recently lost her teenage child to suicide. I cannot imagine, not for a minute, not for a second, the utter grief, pain and torment she and her family are going through at this moment. She told me in no uncertain terms that her child had been failed by the mental health services. She cannot understand why money can be found to buy these pouches but not for proper mental health supports for young people who need them.

I spoke to teenagers in my own family. They wanted me to ask the Minister the following questions. Do you seriously believe that teenagers are allowed to be glued to their phones all day? That is what you said in the media. Do you honestly believe that the teachers just sit there and allow students to be glued to their phones all day? If a student is being bullied by phone, have you a magic wand, Minister, that can ensure the bullies cannot contact the student after school? Do you think the bullies only confine their activities to the school day? Are you aware of the lack of mental health supports available to our young people who need them? Minister, do you know that your magic pouches can be opened with a fridge magnet?

Minister, you are part of a Government of serial wasters, luxury security huts, the most expensive hospital in the world, and modular homes that cost more than bricks and mortar once you lot got involved. Minister, please do the right thing. Spend taxpayers' money where it will make a real difference. Invest in supports for the 3,681 young people waiting for an appointment. Go back to the drawing board. Make sure this €9 million is spent on mental health supports for young people who need them and not on a vanity project for you and Mr. Soundbite.

People are very angry at this Government as it continues to waste any amount of public funds. We have the most expensive bike shed in the State, the most expensive children's hospital in the world, a security hut that cost €1.4 million to deliver and modular homes that were supposed to cost €200,000 but the Government ended up paying €440,000 for them. That is all in a couple of weeks. The list is endless. This Government has a track record of treating taxpayers' money like Monopoly money. For as long as I have been in this House, Ministers for Finance have talked about being prudent but in their next breath they announce the likes of €9 million for phone pouches. What a colossal waste. There is nothing prudent about it. Even worse is the effort to spin it as some sort of mental health measure. It is deeply cynical when schools are crying out for investment in a range of areas.

I want to raise the case of one school in my constituency, Gaelcholáiste Reachrann. It has been fighting for a new school build for 20 years. I have said before that my daughter was in primary school when we were promised this new school build. She is now in college. We had a big announcement of a school build in 2015. Planning was approved in 2019, elapsed in 2022 and approved again in 2023. All the while, students and teachers are going to school in prefabs which are in terrible condition. They wait and they wait. This €9 million could have been used to invest in our DEIS schools and to address educational disadvantage. It could have been used to tackle overcrowded classrooms or increase capitation to meet the never-ending increase in costs . This proposal is tone deaf. There are a hundred better ways the Minister could have spent this money. It is time to ditch it and spend the €9 million on actual supports for our schools.

I am delighted to get the opportunity to highlight the reckless spending by this Government. I have only two minutes, so unfortunately I will not be able to list all the reckless spending even in my constituency. I will concentrate on two projects. The first is Enable Ireland's school in Sandymount, which I have raised with the Minister before. For two years classrooms have been closed to the students in this Sandymount school because of a roof leak. I have raised it in the House on a number of occasions, as I said. It means students cannot get their mobility break and stretch and so are stuck in their wheelchairs all day. The cost of fixing this roof would not be a lot and would be far more beneficial to the students than phone pouches. There is spending of €9 million on phone pouches and €336,000 on a bike shelter while the most vulnerable of our students cannot get the roof fixed. This is outrageous and simply unfair.

The second case of reckless spending in my community is by the Office of Public Works. There is no surprise there. The OPW has got itself into a bizarre 20-year relationship with a group or charity called the Irish Children's Museum Limited. If you want an example of bizarre spending, this is it. This Irish Children's Museum Limited charity has been gifted offices in the National Concert Hall for the past eight years. The project is proceeding with no business plan and no knowledge of how much it is going to cost. There is no estimate at all. There is already a fine science centre, the Explorium, in Sandyford, just 10 km from here. This charity wants to destroy the Iveagh Gardens to deliver this project. It absolutely insane that a private charity, a vanity project, would be allowed destroy a jewel like the Iveagh Gardens. To give some figures, the OPW has spent €2.7 million on third-party costs. It has spent €2.5 million on management time since 2017 to now, estimated in submissions to Dublin City Council. Half a million euro has been spent in legal fees estimated for arbitration. That is €7.7 million spent by the OPW on this vanity project for a private charity, and not a shovel in the ground. Estimated costs have gone up to €70 million and that figure is climbing day by day. It is absolutely bizarre and more bizarre that the Fine Gael Lord Mayor of Dublin backs this project.

I agree with Deputy Andrews. What is more, there is no Minister who will come forward and say he or she is accountable for this and nobody to take responsibility for the wasteful decisions that are being made around it. We will get to the bottom of that on another day.

This Government's wasteful spending of other people's money must be brought to an end. The plan to spend €9 million on fancy phone pouches for schoolkids is just the latest scheme to spend taxpayers' money recklessly and needlessly. I have worked with many schools even before I entered political life and never ever has one of them raised with me the need for storage solutions for mobile phones. What they ask for is funding to keep the bills paid, for new builds and modifications to address crumbling facilities and replace prefabs, to reduce class sizes, to provide autism units, to replace equipment, to get mental health supports and so on. Just think how far an extra €9 million would go to addressing CAMHS waiting lists which, since the formation of this Government, have risen from 2,115 children to 3,681 children waiting for their first appointment. In March of this year, in the Mayo, Galway and Roscommon area, there were six times as many children on waiting lists for mental health services as when this Government came into power in 2020. The numbers waiting increased from 41 to 233. In some cases, children wait more than a year to access mental health supports. The waste of €9 million when it could make a real difference in other areas is a travesty.

As we all know, this Government has a long and distinguished record in wasting the tax collected from citizens' earnings and the VAT they pay on almost every item purchased: the €336,000 bicycle rack, the €1.4 million security hut, and the relentless escalating overruns on the national children's hospital. How many more mismanaged and wasteful projects are coming out? The Government has neither credibility nor accountability when it comes to public finances. It has presided over a culture of waste and cronyism. There are so many more appropriate ways to spend €9 million. What about the children who have been robbed of their childhoods because of the pyrite scandal that nobody is responsible for?

It just happened that thousands of families bought and built homes with crumbling blocks. Yes, it just happened - business as usual, nothing to see. It just happened. A Sinn Féin Government would implement the right priorities, putting citizens first and ending this shocking and sickening waste of money. I was absolutely alarmed to hear earlier about increases in the pyrite and other defective block scandals and - I hope I read this wrong - about it not being issued to people who have already submitted applications. That is absolutely appalling.

I move amendment No. 1:

To delete all the words after "Dáil Éireann" and substitute the following:

"recognising that:

— Government has provided, and continues to provide, a robust response to the challenges and needs facing the Irish nation, through continued investment and leadership in the delivery of public services, important infrastructure projects, and cost-of-living supports, all while continuing to grow the Irish economy and Irish living standards;

— all five budgets under the term of this Government have successfully balanced the dual challenge of remaining responsive to economic and social developments while ensuring fiscal sustainability of the public finances;

— fiscal responsibility is a priority in order to protect our economy and people; sensible choices have been made to allow growth in a sustainable way, to invest in a better future, and to provide a stable and predictable environment;

— public investment over the term of this Government has already made significant positive impacts across a wide range of areas, including the delivery of:

— 116,000 new homes and hundreds of projects under the Rural and Urban Regeneration and Development Funds;

— significant reductions in waiting lists and average waiting times, improved health facilities such as the National Forensic Mental Hospital in Portrane, hospital extensions and new primary care centres and community nursing units across the country;

— significant upgrades to Ireland's national road network and improvement to the public transport system, including BusConnects;

— high-quality cultural and sporting amenities such as the Sports Campus in Blanchardstown; and

— continued progress under the National Broadband Plan such that over 250,000 homes have now been passed and can avail of the high-quality connectivity offered by this plan; and

— the ongoing war in Ukraine and other factors have resulted in significant inflationary pressures throughout the world and within Ireland, which the State has sought to manage through the introduction of stronger supports for Departments delivering infrastructure projects and the ongoing engagement through the Construction Sector Group and Project Ireland 2040 Delivery Board;

further notes that:

— Budget 2025 will build on and continue the enhanced investment of recent years in our society and our economy; the budget strategy has been framed in the context of a growing population and elevated price levels over the last number of years;

— under Budget 2025, Government continues to invest in important public services, including through the expansion of health services, increases in core social welfare allowances, increased investment in housing, expansion of the Hot School Meals programme;

— Budget 2025 will deliver a €1.5 billion budget for mental health, representing an increase in the lifetime of this Government of 44 per cent;

— €150 million in dedicated annual funding is provided to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), with a further €110 million for community-based mental health services and non-Governmental organisations; an additional investment of €2.9 million in CAMHS initiatives in 2025 will deliver additional staffing for CAMHS teams, expansion of CAMHS Hubs Teams, expansion of the Single Point of Access for services for children, and the development of a CAMHS Emergency Department Liaison Service;

— this will build on progress in reducing CAMHS waiting lists, strengthen the new central referral mechanism (known as 'no wrong door'), and the further roll-out of CAMHS Hubs which provide an alternative to hospital admission in times of acute crisis;

— ongoing investment and reform of youth mental health services is delivering better outcomes, including reduced waiting lists in August 2024 as compared to the same time period in 2023, as well as a specific reduction in the number of children waiting longer than 12 months;

— Budget 2025 will also deliver an €11.8 billion investment in education, delivering a 12 per cent increase in core capitation rates (building on the 9 per cent increase secured under Budget 2024), extending free schoolbooks to all students enrolled in the free scheme, the hiring of 1,600 additional Special Needs Assistants and 768 Special Education Teachers and continued expansion of the School Transport Scheme;

— experts and bodies such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation and the United States Surgeon General have recognised the hugely negative impact that smartphones and social media have on students' academic learning and wellbeing;

— Budget 2025 outlines capital expenditure of €14.9 billion, an increase of approximately €1.6 billion or 12.3 per cent over the 2024 allocation;

— capital spending has grown at a higher rate than current spend over the last number of years, as the increased investment under the National Development Plan (NDP) ramps up, providing housing, school buildings and transport infrastructure, building capacity for our future;

— investment in infrastructure is a critical component in supporting Ireland's growth and in delivering better, fit-for-purpose public services; the increased capital spend in Budget 2025 continues the delivery of a NDP that is providing the vital infrastructure we need to support our future economic and social requirements, as well as our climate change commitments;

— the delivery of capital projects has been challenged by a number of significant factors in recent years, including the continued impact of construction inflation on projects, labour shortages, particularly in the construction sector, and the ongoing delays in getting projects through the planning system;

— the Government has approved a number of priority actions to improve delivery of NDP projects, including the introduction of new Infrastructure Guidelines to reduce the administrative burden on Departments charged with infrastructure delivery; the Minister for Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform also chairs the reconstituted Project Ireland 2040 Delivery Board which is charged with driving the delivery of the NDP; these actions will boost the delivery of critical infrastructure in a sustainable and cost effective manner, such as 330 school building projects in 2023 and BusConnects; and

— the Office of Public Works has introduced new governance measures and revisions to project approval thresholds to ensure Management Board oversight and approval of all works above €200,000; and

condemns:

— Sinn Féin's baseless accusations of mismanagement and cynical posturing in respect of vital public services, all while failing to take responsibility and show leadership in respect of their own record in Northern Ireland; and

— Sinn Féin's blatant hypocrisy and flipflopping on smartphones given the recent decision by the Northern Ireland Executive to pilot the use of lockable pouches in Northern Irish schools.".

I welcome this opportunity to address the House on this important issue and to respond to some of the baseless accusations set out by Sinn Féin in its motion. Many Deputies have focused on the provision of secure mobile phone storage, as though it were the only measure delivered in the budget. Let us take a look at what this budget and previous budgets have delivered in value for money and investment in quality education.

Over the course of this Government, we have extended the free schoolbooks scheme to students from junior infants to sixth year, bringing more than 940,000 students into the scheme and saving parents thousands of euro over the course of their child's education. We have increased capitation, which Deputies also referred to, the core grant funding provided to schools to meet day-to-day running costs, by €75 million, bringing it to a record level of more than €400 million for our schools, or 12% above the previous capitation peak. We have increased special needs assistant, SNA, allocations and special education teaching numbers by more than 1,000 in every budget introduced over the past four years. This year, we have made provision for more than 1,600 additional SNAs and 768 special education teachers such that now more than 40,000 full-time education professionals work with students with special educational needs.

Those who work in education, be they teachers or otherwise, should be there to teach and not to be phone police. So, when I hear Sinn Féin lambast the “wasteful spending of public funds by this Government”, I wonder which part of the education budget the Deputies would like to cut. Would they like to cut the number of excellent teachers and education staff throughout the country, who ensure Irish students remain among the highest performing students in the world when it comes to literacy and numeracy? Would Sinn Féin seek to reduce the record budget of €2.9 billion that has been allocated to special education, now supporting nearly 4,000 special classes in the country? Would it cut Ireland’s school building programme, which last year invested in excess of €1.2 billion in schools and has delivered more than 1,200 school building projects in recent years?

To cite just a few examples of these building projects, there is Scoil Mhuire Gan Smál in Blarney, County Cork, a new post-primary school with accommodation for 1,000 pupils, including four new classrooms for special education. That was commenced in August 2023 and finished in February 2024, at a total investment of €31.5 million. Mercy Secondary School in Kilbeggan, County Westmeath, has a new 8,000 sq. m post-primary school building providing accommodation for more than 650 pupils. It includes both general and specialist teaching facilities, four classrooms for children with special educational needs and all associated ancillary accommodation. That project was completed in August 2023 with an investment of more than €20 million. In my constituency, I recently opened Gaelcholáiste Chiarraí, a 600-pupil post-primary school completed in March 2023 at a cost of more than €20 million.

To be clear, public expenditure should never be allowed to just happen without strong oversight and checks, and to this end, it is appropriate and important that the Comptroller and Auditor General reviews and supervises expenditure. Clearly, there is no defence for the astronomical sums that have been spent on the security hut in the Department of Finance or on the bike shelter at Leinster House. There needs to be a fundamental review of how these projects unfolded and how costs reached these levels, and we need full transparency over how public moneys are allocated.

I want to address Sinn Féin’s call on the Government to halt our investment in smartphone bans throughout the country. In the first instance, I hope it sent a copy of its motion to its colleagues in Northern Ireland, because the Northern Ireland Executive has allocated funding to pilot lockable smartphone pouches in schools in Northern Ireland at an average cost of £25,000 per school. I presume these colleagues have seen the research that I have from bodies such as the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization, which highlights how even one ping from a smartphone can distract a student for up to 20 minutes. Maybe they have spoken to the principals I have spoken to, who describe the transformative impact the introduction of smartphone storage has had on their schools. They highlight the better learning outcomes, the chatter that now fills breaktimes and lunchtimes and the space that is created for extracurricular activities. The investment in lockable smartphone pouches is an outcome that will protect our young people. Surely Sinn Féin would not want any additional cost to be levied on parents or any students to be excluded for want of funding. That is why the Government has decided to provide this funding, at a cost of approximately €20 per student, to more than 720 schools in the country. These pouches will be owned by the schools and used again and again.

The investment in lockable smartphone pouches is investment in our young people. It will enhance their learning outcomes. It is, in effect, a child protection measure and I wonder whether Sinn Féin, in addressing me during this debate, is saying it objects to a child protection measure in our schools.

The Government has provided significant additional investment to enhance all aspects of our mental health care, including that of children and young people. This is in line with our mental health policy, Sharing the Vision, and our suicide reduction strategy, Connecting for Life. Good progress continues to be made on the implementation of both policies.

Over the lifetime of the Government, funding for mental health has increased by 44%. Year-on-year funding for mental health services has increased by €143.5 million, from €1.338 billion in budget 2024 to nearly €1.5 billion in budget 2025, with a strong focus on youth mental health. This is a 10.7% annual increase, a record funding level and an increase for the fifth year in a row. The significant funding of €16 million for new developments will bring about realistic and continued improvement overall, including for youth mental health and the opening of more beds at the Central Mental Hospital in Portrane. I emphasise that the €16 million is for new developments, not additional funding, which itself amounts to €143.5 million.

The child and adolescent mental health service, CAMHS, receives approximately €150 million in dedicated funding annually. In addition, approximately €110 million is being provided to community-based mental health organisations and NGOs this year, with a significant proportion dedicated to supporting young people. A priority for the Government is to improve access to CAMHS and reduce waiting lists, including better links with primary care and disability services and greater use of e-mental health responses.

The new national office for child and youth mental health in the HSE is a significant development to improve leadership and management in youth mental health. The new office has taken full account of various recent reports and audits into CAMHS and is developing a new youth mental health improvement plan, which will be published shortly. This will further improve the approach of the HSE to child-centred care and to quality and safety. The HSE has worked closely with the Mental Health Commission over the past year or so to develop and implement improvement plans as needed following the interim and final reports by the commission on CAMHS. The 35 recommendations arising from the publication of the Maskey report reviewing south Kerry CAMHS care resulted in a public apology by the HSE and led to a number of follow-up actions. The latest HSE implementation framework contains a total of 63 actions, both local and national, against the 35 recommendations. Thirty-six of the actions, both local and national, have been completed, with others under way. In respect of south Kerry CAMHS, 33 of the 35 Maskey recommendations had been implemented as of April 2024.

CAMHS provides specialist mental health supports to children and young people who are experiencing moderate or severe mental health difficulties. Evidence shows that only 2% of children and young people need the support of the specialist CAMHS multidisciplinary teams. Access is based on a prioritised clinical assessment. CAMHS teams, along with a wide range of other youth mental health supports provided by or on behalf of the HSE, make a crucial and real difference to the lives of many vulnerable young people and their families each year.

As detailed in the HSE's national service plan for 2024, CAMHS expects to receive approximately 23,000 referrals this year, of whom approximately 13,700 are expected to be seen by the service in line with operational guidelines. There continues to be a growing demand for CAMHS, with the 77 community teams nationally delivering approximately 240,000 appointments for children and young people annually. Between 2020 and 2021, referral rates to CAMHS increased by 33%, while the number of new cases seen increased by 21% in the same period. To the end of August 2024, 9,489 referrals were accepted to community CAMHS, which is 6.9% more than in the same period in 2023. There were 3,681 children on the CAMHS waiting list nationally in August 2024, which represents a decrease of 210 compared with the 3,891 in August 2023. A total of 94% of urgent referrals to CAMHS in August last were responded to within 72 hours, which is above the 90% target.

The level of anger around the country about the phone pouch scheme is quite shocking. The Minister, Deputy Foley, mentioned principals to whom she has spoken who praised the initiative. I have heard nobody anywhere praising it. I have spoken to several principals and teachers and they are all saying the same, namely, that they need money for summer works schemes, special needs assistants and to ensure they have adequate classroom spaces to be able to teach children. In some schools, special classes are being taken in corridors.

There is an effort to dress this scheme up as some kind of mental health initiative. The problem for parents whose child has a mental health problem, including depression or self-harming, is that they cannot access assessments through the Department and they cannot get assistance when they need it. I am glad the Minister of State, Deputy Burke, focused on CAMHS in his speech. For the vast majority of people, their experience of CAMHS is atrocious. They simply cannot get help. This has been going on not just for the past six months but for the past six years. It is an ongoing problem. All the CAMHS units around the country have approximately half the capacity they need. They do not have the nursing staff, psychologists or any of the other staff they need to carry out their functions adequately and proportionately. Children come to the service and are seen by one person. The next time they present, they see a different person, and another person again on the next occasion. The one point everyone in mental health makes is that patients need consistency, regularity and a sense of routine. That routine simply is not there in the vast majority of cases.

The Minister of State spoke about the investment there has been and said the situation has improved. However, the experience of the vast majority of people around the country is that things have not improved when it comes to mental health services. Likewise, there certainly has not been an improvement in provision within our education system across the length and breadth of the country. To the vast majority of people, including teachers and mental health professionals, providing children with a pouch in which to put their mobile phone, at a cost of €9 million, is an absolute waste of money. That money would be better spent on something that would actually deliver for our children.

I am delighted the Minister, Deputy Foley, got off her chest everything that is wrong with Sinn Féin. She has now left the building. We will keep going.

The expenditure of €9 million on phone pouches is unbelievable. That is €9 million. It is so unbelievable that I had to say it twice. It is even more unbelievable when we start doing the sums on how €9 million of taxpayers' money could and should have been better spent. My colleague Deputy Clarke and other colleagues have already set out those figures. Perhaps repeating them might help them sink in for the Government.

This money could have been used to provide more school transport places. However, for people in rural Kildare whose children have lost out in the school transport place lottery, there is no need to worry; a phone pouch will be waiting for their children at school to ease their pain. Using the money to employ 220 new special needs assistants would mean some south Kildare parents would get an SNA for their child but, no, a phone pouch is by far a better deal for the Government. What about additional funds to help schools with energy bills? Heaven forbid our schoolchildren would be warm. It seems it is better to spend that money on phone pouches instead. Is the Minister of State, Deputy Burke, listening to me?

I could say I am shocked at the Government's ludicrous decision to waste €9 million. However, it has a long and costly history of wasting public funds, from bicycle sheds and security huts to the never-ending national children's hospital saga, which the Minister of State did not bother to mention. The list is endless. The Government makes a decision, the taxpayer pays and essential services suffer as a result. CAMHS has been given only a third of what has been allocated for these pouches in the budget. We see scant concern there for children’s mental health. Will Ministers stop defending the indefensible? Will they admit that spending €9 million on phone pouches is completely inappropriate and a waste of public money and that the money could go a long way to remedying the chaos caused by the Government's undermining of children's mental health services?

Deputy Johnny Mythen: The recent announcement in budget 2025 of €9 million to be allocated for the purchase of magnetic pouches for mobile phones has caused a lot of anger and disbelief among the public. The Taoiseach's take on it, trivialising the cost to a mere €20 a head, does not wash. The fact is that €9 million is on offer. Yet, in the same budget, only €10 million was allocated to core capitation grant funding. That money has to pay for heating, lighting and cleaning for schools around the country. Each of those categories of expenditure has seen its costs soar with the rise in the cost of living. Yet, together, they are given an allocation of just €1 million above that for mobile phone pouches. Compare this with the summer school programmes for children with special needs being cut by 33% this summer. Where is the Government's priorities when we see the exorbitant cost of bike sheds and security huts, not to mention the expenditure on the children's hospital and the doubling of the purchase price of modular homes?

We call on the Government to reverse the decision to spend €9 million on a completely unnecessary and foolhardy project and to put the money where it is most needed, namely, in children's mental health and schools. School managers are crying out for extra space for special needs classes and teachers and for vice principal posts, which were allowed to critically lapse over the past few years, to be filled. Teachers are dealing with overcrowded classrooms. I am sure they would appreciate investment to tackle that issue instead of having to worry about where to store mobile phones. In Enniscorthy, we have the third biggest DEIS school outside of Dublin. I am sure it would appreciate an increase in its DEIS grant.

In the mental health sector, only €16 million was allocated for new measures, with €2.9 million for CAMHS. With respect to the Minister of State, one cannot put a person's mental health into a pouch. There are 3,681 children waiting for a first-time appointment with CAMHS. I ask the Government to support our motion and reverse the decision to spend €9 million on what can only be described as a complete waste of public money.

The Taoiseach sets the tone on how to spend public money. In his previous role as Minister for Health, he showed how wasteful Fine Gael is when it comes to taxpayers' money. The State is spending €2 billion, if not more, on a children's hospital that is not even ready. The completion date has been pushed back again and again, with the latest indication that it will be in 2026. There is no definite date for completion. As the then Minister for Health, the Taoiseach signed off on the construction of the project. He reappointed the board at a time of escalating costs. Somehow, however, it is somebody else's fault, not his. He has set the tone.

Now we have the Government spending €9 million on phone pouches, suggesting that we give children a break from their smartphones. I am sure we all agree that schoolchildren need a break from the voices on social media and that their mental health and focus on their education must be protected. However, the Government parties wasting €9 million is not the way to go about it. Last week, I met a group of second level pupils from a Limerick school here in Leinster House. Five of them explained to me how this scheme would not work, would be easily circumvented and how they were looking forward to the challenge. They described it as an utter waste of money. They all told me about other things that could be done in their school with additional moneys.

The €9 million for pouches could be used across the State to assist schools. Part of it could be used to address the needs of Le Chéile National School on the south side of Limerick. The school caters for 186 children in an area the Pobal deprivation index has described as extremely disadvantaged. Staff estimate that 72% of pupils have an additional need, with 38% having more than one additional need. I have raised this situation previously as a Topical Issue but there has been no action on it since then. I put in a parliamentary question regarding the school last Thursday. As I said, many of its pupils have significant needs.

Each Department it contacts seems to move the blame, wash its hands and pass it on to another Department. A parliamentary question response I got last Thursday on this issue said that these resources the school is looking for, like SETs and SNA supports, should be put in place by the schools where the schools identify additional educational needs. How is the school supposed to do that when the staff can hardly heat the school?

This Government has had plenty of opportunities to build a legacy of competency, stability and fiscal rectitude. Instead of a legacy of achievement, this Government can boast of a legacy of crisis, ineptitude and incompetence. The Government has a responsibility to help the vulnerable in society, particularly those who struggle each day because of a disability, mental health issues or addiction problems or because they are elderly and infirm. The lack of supports and proper resourcing from the Government means people rely heavily on voluntary and community supports. The reality is that tens of thousands of vulnerable people across the country do not have access to proper care or vital services. This Government has not prioritised the need for investment in such services and supports. Instead of wasting taxpayers' money on projects that defy logic when it comes to their final cost, the Government could provide early intervention supports for mental health. It could expand youth mental health supports and the national clinical programmes in mental health.

This Government's careless disregard for spending is clearly reflected in the outrageous cost of the children's hospital. That cost is only for the shell of the building and does not include the fit-out cost. It is not the only HSE project to go over budget. The Irish Medical Times has reported that six recently completed HSE construction projects went over budget by more than €17 million. Modular homes for refugees originally estimated to cost €200,000 per unit are instead coming in at €436,000, 120% over the estimated cost, and they are only half the size of a normal house. The shocking cost of the bike shed, the phone pouches and the Dáil security hut are like a punch to the stomach to the homeless, the single parents struggling to put food on the table for their children, the parents trying to find a school place for their child with autism, and those looking for disability or mental health supports. This will continue while the coalition parties are in government. Clearly, it is time for change.

The Labour Party will support the motion. We note the Government's countermotion, in which there seems to be a strong emphasis on all the moneys being spent by the Government across a whole range of areas, from CAMHS to the capital expenditure on infrastructure right through to things like BusConnects. Nobody would discount the fact that the Government has expended large amounts of taxpayers' money on these projected projects, but what we are not seeing is the delivery of these projects. I think the reason people get so annoyed and vexed about things like bike sheds and the costs of modular dwellings and security huts is that if they do not see the basic services being provided to them, services to which they are entitled by dint of the fact that they are taxpayers and have contributed, those issues get multiplied tenfold. It is a reflection of the anger people feel about the lack of delivery of basic public services.

A central theme tonight is child and adolescent mental health services, but it seems to me that the key driver of a shortage of those services is the lack of investment in talent. There are labour shortages across a whole range of medical and other skill sets, like audiology, physiotherapy - all the therapies. There are major shortages across all those disciplines. Taking post-recovery as being 2016 or slightly before, these issues were writ large in 2015, 2016 and right through to 2024. However, one does not see the emphasis by the Government on the issue of ensuring an investment in people and attracting the talent that is necessary to meet the lack of services available right across issues like CAMHS, nursing and doctors. Infrastructural projects cannot be delivered or are coming in at a massive cost because of labour shortages.

There was a wonderful opportunity for the Government to say in the budget announced last week that it would invest in people and in meeting the skills shortages that are there. It did not even talk about those skills shortages. It threw money out at every kind of mechanism and measure and it just made people angry. I think the mobile phone pouch issue is an articulation of that anger. If moneys were available and services were being populated by the requisite skills, I am not sure people would have been so vexed about mobile phone pouches, the cost of the bike shed or even the cost of the security hut, to be frank. What really annoys people, however, my constituents in particular, is where, for instance, I am talking to people in Mallow General Hospital and they tell me they now have to cut lists for procedures because of the lack of haematology services as one cannot backfill or there is not the requisite number of whole-time equivalents. That is what annoys people. If I am talking to a mother of a child and the child cannot access an assessment of needs or get the follow-on therapies that are required, like audiology, physiotherapy, psychology - all the "ologies" you care to mention - because of a lack of the requisite skills, that is a major issue for that family. The Government has not focused on backfilling the skills shortages.

As regards my tertiary hospital, Cork University Hospital, for instance, I got quite vexed in 2023 when I discovered that management in CUH had spent over €600,000 on outside consultancy services for advices on management functions at a time when the trolleys were coming out the door of the accident and emergency - and that was in 2023. Fast-forward to 2024 and the lists have not reduced in any great shape or form and the same system still persists. There is a disconnect between where the Government is and where the people are as regards filling the shortages of skills that are so necessary for the people waiting for CAMHS, the people waiting for elective procedures and urgent procedures in hospitals and the people waiting for services to flow in through schools and right across society. That is where people are getting really annoyed.

The countermotion refers to BusConnects. There was a briefing last night in Cork provided by Bus Éireann on BusConnects. Councillor John Maher and Councillor Peter Horgan attended and asked the simple question, "How many drivers short are you at present in Bus Éireann in Cork?" The answer came back that in May and June it was short 42 drivers, that it is now 16 short, that 11 are in training, that 70 drivers would be needed for the first phase of BusConnects and that 170 would be needed in total. To be fair to those city councillors, they are scratching their heads and asking the question, as I am sure Bus Éireann is, how will it fill those 170 vacancies? Again, it is an example of where vacancies arise. There are nearly 900 vacancies across the Cork-Kerry HSE south region in respect of hospitals, and there has not been a breakdown as to where those shortages are. We get headline figures based on parliamentary question replies - administrative, acute, non-acute, etc. - but no further breakdowns.

The dogs in the street, however, know that we have a shortage of nurses, doctors and specialist disciplines throughout the hospital system. We submitted parliamentary questions on the costs of recruitment accruing to the HSE in procuring external consultants. The reply to one such parliamentary question told me the HSE had spent €15 million. We are not seeing the throughput of skills. That must be the overarching and abiding focus of the Government. The way in which to provide services is to fill the vacancies. If vacancies are filled, the services flow from there.

Child and adult mental health services are the bread and butter. Every child deserves access to a service, regardless of where, or who, he or she is. If the services are telling us they cannot recruit, and if the Government is funding the HSE or each of these CDNTs or primary care teams, then the Government has to put the focus on ensuring it goes out to the world to fill the vacancies when they arise and make it a core policy of the Government to ensure that people who need a service can get access to it as and when they need it.

The Government, for quite a number of years, has taken the foot off the pedal. While we all understand people will travel once they have attained their degrees and some level of professional competency, and that is entirely understandable, the market, and I use the word “market” intentionally, for skills is a global one. It is agnostic in terms of nationality. There are plenty of programmes such as the one that is now being provided for GPs in primary care centres, which has had some measure of success. That needs to be replicated right across the system. Notwithstanding the massive cost of public money spent on things like bike sheds, security huts, mobile phone pouches and so on, a lot of these things can be dealt with. What people essentially want are public services and the skilled people to deliver them.

I thank Sinn Féin for bringing forward this motion. Sinn Féin’s motion is one-page long and sticks to phone pouches and child and adult mental health services, while the Government’s countermotion is significantly longer and goes wider. With that in mind, I will also go wider in my condemnation.

In many ways this debate is about phone pouches but in many other ways it absolutely is not. There is perhaps a world in which a budget allocation of €9 million to provide a phone pouch to every student the length and breadth of Ireland could possibly make sense, but that world is not our reality and does not have some 251,149 students going to school every single day in overcrowded classes of 25 students or more per teacher. The allocation could possibly make sense on that imaginary world. As I noticed the Minister, Deputy Foley, listed achievements in her own constituency of Kerry, as she usually does, I will highlight that, of the 251,149 students nationally going to school in overcrowded classes, the Minister’s constituency accounts for 7,340 students. The allocation would possibly make sense - and it would not have generated such vitriolic anger throughout this Chamber, which the Taoiseach tried to describe as faux outrage today - if it were not presented as a mental health initiative, while at the same time child and adult mental health services were awarded €2.9 million. That stimulates anger. It gets my blood boiling. Not a single week will pass without a distressed parent or guardian calling each of our offices looking for their children to access a basic need, namely, education, as is their entitlement as citizens of this country. We simply do not have enough of the basic services such as autism spectrum disorder classrooms, sufficient access to speech and language therapists for children, follow-on care after autism assessments, or sufficient occupational therapists or educational psychologists. We do not have any therapists on site.

The Minister has announced the allocation of new SNAs. While the budget has undoubtedly allocated for more SNAs, they are still one of the most underpaid and undervalued cohorts. The Minister of State, Deputy Burke, can sigh all he likes. Is he denying that reality? He is welcome to back up his denial with evidence.

It may also be the case that if €9 million was allocated for phone pouches in a country that did not have 176,000 children - one in seven - living in poverty, it would not be such a farcical suggestion and would not stimulate the type of anger we are seeing among the public and in this Chamber. It is not necessarily about the €9 million for the phone pouches but, rather, the absolute absence of vision and awareness.

As my party's spokesperson on education, I engage with classes, school leaders and parents most weeks. There has not been one week when a principal has turned to me and said that what would make his or her life easier is a magnetic phone pouch. This is an insult to the school community. There is not one primary school in this country where you will walk in and see every child with their phone out, looking at social media. That is not the reality, despite the manner in which Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have tried to present it this week. For the best part of two decades, school leaders and parent councils have been operating their own initiatives. They have radical solutions which might blow the Minister of State away, such as a press in which students can place their phones at the start of the day. They have agreements between students and parents about leaving phones at home. Each school is operating a different initiative, and many of them are working.

No one doubts for a second that online social media abuse and bullying is a real and difficult issue which needs to be challenged at all levels of our society, but magnetic phone cases are not going to do that. It is not even a sticking plaster on the issue. School leaders, parents and guardians have been crying out for proper access to mental health supports and for the Government’s own anti-bullying campaigns to be given the appropriate level of financing in order that we can have advocates and more leaders in every school who are able to address these issues as they occur. The hobby-horse the Minister has been peddling when asked what she will do about the fact that there are schools in this country that cannot get teachers to fill staff shortages, where teachers have to run between classes and cannot provide students with an appropriate education, such is the extent of staff shortages, is the phone pouches. When teachers, schools and unions ask for these things, she holds up the phones as some sort of initiative. The issue of overcrowded classrooms has not received even close to the amount of attention the Minister, Deputy Foley, has given to phones. This is a smokescreen to cover very real issues happening in schools every single day.

There are a number of different initiatives the €9 million allocation could have covered. We can all pick out ones close to our hearts. For me, that is DEIS plus. The Minister of State might not be aware what DEIS plus is, given that it did not feature in last week’s budget. DEIS plus is a recognition that poverty does not happen on the same scale for every student across the board. Poverty is not just a word we throw around. The Minister of State can sigh all he likes. Poverty is what a child or his or her parents or guardian are asked to go without. Poverty includes students who show up to school without a warm coat or students who do not have access to a second pair of shoes should they damage their one pair while playing football. The budget last week lacked any vision in terms of addressing those real issues and the €9 million became a lightning rod for all of the other issues the Government is failing to address.

The €9 million will have no effect when it comes to the fact that at some point in the next couple of weeks - it has already happened in some cases - there will be children going home with letters in their schoolbags asking for a voluntary contribution, which is never voluntary, because the Government has not provided enough in increased capitation grants for schools to keep their heating on. Last month, schools contacted me because they did not have enough in their budget to do a deep clean as would be the norm in September. The Government offers €9 million for phone pouches and gets on its high horse, with the Taoiseach claiming it is faux outrage when it is put to him that this is another wasteful squandering of money.

Since the Minister of State is part of a Government that has been asked about its education allocation and has decided to bang its own chest and table an amendment to the motion seeking to refer to all the wonderful things it has done, let me refer to that. Some such revised motions are laughable. I nearly fell off my chair today when I read the last part of the amendment to the motion before us, such was its absolute hilarity. It challenges what it refers to as "baseless accusations of mismanagement and cynical posturing in respect of vital public services". Did the Minister of State read last week’s report by the Comptroller and Auditor General? Was it another example of baseless accusation when the Comptroller and Auditor General referred to the Government’s mismanagement regarding modular homes? When we talk about gross financial overspending on major public transport projects, are we making a baseless accusation? Just today, we heard another example of gross overspending: €2.7 billion is to be spent to introduce a system of contactless public transport payments. London, even with its population, was able to introduce a similar measure, at a cost of €11 million, and was able to accrue €4 million in savings. We are spending €2.7 billion but still do not have a system up and running.

The Government likes to take credit for things it is supposed to do. It is supposed to fund occupational therapy and allocate money for the mental health services; it is not supposed to give more for its own fanciful initiatives. I will not even get into the greyhound fund, which got €19.7 million in the budget although the provision for domestic violence services did not even reach €9 million. Show us your budget and you will show us your values. The Government is taking credit for what it is supposed to do. For every year this Chamber has existed, there has been a budget, but never before have we had the opportunity to achieve so much and distribute money in a way that would ensure not a single problem facing this country would not be addressed.

Today the Taoiseach was issuing his usual soundbites, asking which particular measure my party colleague Cian O’Callaghan would take away. Would the Minister of State like me to name some? He can tell the Taoiseach when he comes back. Over the past three years, over €100 million in energy grants has been given to people in second homes. I would like to take that off the table. When the Minister of State gets a chance, he should send the Taoiseach a memo. I might actually email him about it because he gave us his address today. He should also address the fact that consistent poverty in this country is such that over 180,000 working people still cannot afford the bare essentials. I would like to target some of the payments at them to take them out of poverty.

The Government has made some farcical and ridiculous choices, and once again it has prioritised its own self-interest, having devised a budget that is solely about winning votes, to the detriment of the population of what we call a republic. The budget was sickening. An allocation of €9 million for phone pouches exemplifies a Government and Department that are out of touch. I hope to God that when the Government faces the electorate it is trying to buy off, it will be held to account for it.

We need to talk about private procurement, phone pouches, security huts and bike sheds. The bike shed is actually illustrative of what goes on. A total of €336,000 of public money was spent on a shed for 18 bikes. There has been much media commentary to the effect that this is what happens when the State is in charge of a project or when the public sector is involved with one. The OPW did not build the bike shed, however. It does not do direct labour in that way. It contracted out for the bike shed; it outsourced the work. The contract was given to a private company, Sensori Facilities Management. This is an example of a private company profiting from public moneys. I would be interested in knowing the value of the contracts Sensori has had with the OPW in recent years and the value of contracts it has had across the public sector. I would also be interested in knowing who in the OPW signed off on the bike shed project.

Let me stand back from that example and try to look at the bigger picture. The 1990s and the first 20 years of the 21st century were the age of neoliberalism, privatisation and deregulation. Throughout the OECD area, it is reckoned that between 15% and 45% of public expenditure – it varies from country to country – now goes on private procurement or contracting out to private companies. Invariably, costs overrun because these companies are for-profit outfits. I could list examples for quite some time but will just mention metro north, the Cork event centre, modular homes, the National Treatment Purchase Fund, the public moneys paid to private nursing homes, and the way councils outsource their works on parks, roads and housing maintenance.

The example of all examples in this State in recent times is what has happened with the national children’s hospital. The current estimate for this is €2.2 billion. The committee in charge of overseeing the work on the children’s hospital on behalf of the State made a complaint that the private contractor, BAM, was attempting to extract every penny from the State, the taxpayer, on this project. It is right but it is wrong to be surprised. That is what big corporations do and what they exist for. We need to move from private procurement so the public sector can provide public services on a not-for-profit basis. In this instance, we need to establish a State construction company, not just to build major public projects like the national children’s hospital but also to have a laser focus on the delivery of social and affordable housing on a not-for-profit basis.

I will give an example from Cork. People might think the example I am about to give is that of the Cork events centre, in which BAM is also involved, with Live Nation also being part of the picture. The estimated cost for the State originally was €20 million. I was actually at the meeting of Cork City Council when it supported the proposal with €20 million in public funds. I raised issues on the night, saying it would be far cheaper and faster if the work were done as a public project. The public cost is now expected to rise to close to €100 million. We are still awaiting information from the Government on the latest news on this.

The example from Cork I wish to give is the giving of the design, build and operate contract for the new Lee Road waterworks to a private company. The moneys handed to that company for the contract amounted to €40 million. People might think that would be money well spent if it resulted in an improvement in water services in the city, but it has achieved anything but. The chemicals that were put into the water are put into water in many countries and cities around the world, but when they interacted with pipes below the ground, which in some cases were 100 years old, it resulted in the stripping of sediment from the inside of those pipes and in brown and orange water, discoloured water, coming from people's taps. This is an example of private procurement and the allocation of a large sum of money to a private company that resulted not in a better water service but a far worse one and a real social problem in Cork city, with people having to deal with the situation. I have spoken about this here many times and will not go into further detail tonight.

The Nevin Economic Research Institute, NERI, has studied the experience of outsourcing in the State and has found that there are real costs for the public. There are higher costs than if it were done by the public sector in terms of the profit margins that are built in. There are environmental costs when corners are cut in the interest of profit. There are legal costs when the State has to go legal to enforce contracts, as is looming at the national children's hospital. There are also social costs in terms of the treatment of employees. In general, there are lower wages, less job security, worse conditions in terms of pensions, maternity leave, sick pay, holiday arrangements and so on. The report, entitled "The decision to contract out: understanding the full social and economic impacts", points to 8% of these contracts going to pure profit, 20% going to higher management expenditure costs than would be the case in public sector contracts and wages accounting for 40%, as opposed to 60% on public jobs. There is a real social cost there, as I said, in terms of lowers wages, less job security and worse conditions.

Privatisation and the outsourcing of State contracts, which is happening internationally and in this country on a grand scale, is not good for society. It does not deliver better services or benefit the public purse. In many cases, it results in services that are less than otherwise could and should be the case, and worse conditions, both for employees and for society. We need a reversal of that process and have public investment for the public good in the public interest, rather than the State and society being ripped off by private procurement.

I am sharing time with Deputies Shanahan and Verona Murphy.

I move amendment No. 1 to amendment No. 1:

To delete all the words after "recognising that" and substitute the following:

"there is a need for the Government to commit to protecting the public purse, seek value for the citizen and implement accountability to ensure that there is a cost to high ranking civil servants or Government Ministers wherever there is an incident of unjustifiable waste of taxpayers' money.".

I want to talk about public expenditure. Listening to Deputy Barry, there is an attitude that when money is wasted, it is wasted by a contractor, builder or whatever. When you look at some of the issues, and I have looked at them carefully, such as the modular homes, I think it is specification and an overindulgence by designers. The bicycle shelter here is an overindulgence in design. I do not think the particular bicycle shelter is actually functional. The children's hospital has gone the same way. It is an overindulgence in design, leaving us with a beautiful building that costs a huge amount of money, whereas we could have built a simpler form of building for a cheaper price and it still would have been functional for what we need it for. When a child is sick, the child needs to be in comfort. The child does not want to have a curved building in which he or she can recover; the child just needs a simple, functional building.

I will raise a few examples with the Minister of State. In Tuam, we built we the Joe and Helen O'Toole community nursing home - when I say we, I mean the taxpayer - for €17 million. It opened last year. A local trust put €7 million toward the €17 million for this 50-bed, state-of-the-art nursing unit. In their wisdom, the designers decided to put a roof garden on the top of it. There is now an issue with HIQA because of that. Twelve months later, 25 beds in the community nursing unit are not yet registered with HIQA. That is a waste of money. An X-ray facility has gone into the primary care centre in Tuam. It opened this year, after funding was first secured for it in 2017. One HSE official said they were putting the patient first. Today, a person will wait three months to get an X-ray there because a member of staff is on maternity leave and there is no plan to replace her. This is the kind of daftness we have. We have a children's disability network team, CDNT, in the refurbished old hospital in Tuam for children with disabilities. Half of it is for the children's disability unit. However, it is only half-staffed. That is a waste of money. The buildings are fine and the investment is good, but we do not have the follow-through to make sure we get the optimum value and outcome from the buildings we have. As a quantity surveyor, I look at that and ask where this goes wrong. If this were in the private sector, where I worked for more than 30 years, heads would roll. Heads do not seem to roll here, which is why Deputy Tóibín and I have tabled an amendment to the Government amendment. We want to see accountability, not just accountability in terms of yap, talk and reports, but there has to be a cost if senior people make decisions, and it costs the taxpayer more money. We can talk all we like and fill all the papers with all the news we like, but there has to be consequences to the actions every one of us takes. That includes the people who make decisions about spending taxpayers' money unwisely or wasting it. I would like to think that is where we would go with this discussion, rather than just having political point scoring. It is important we understand that this is not our money. This is taxpayers' money, and we have a responsibility.

I am sure the Minister of State is aware of the old adages of "The easiest way to make a pound is to spend a pound" and "Mind the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves". It is fair to say that during the Celtic tiger, the realisation was made by many that many poor investments are made when an abundance of money is there and money is plentiful. It is also fair to say an abundance of money is often also inversely proportional to the care with which it is spent. We have wide evidence of that at the moment in our public spending code. Look at the children's hospital, the bike shed and the security hut. I could go on. What about the national maternity hospital? Look at the money invested in metro north already, and what chance have we got of that project coming anywhere close to the scope it will be started with? What to do is the question. We need to mimic what happens in the private sector. How many CEOs or CFOs would remain in post were some of the dysfunctional spending decisions this Government has taken to happen in the private sector? Very few would, I can tell you. We are robbing the most needy in our society with this wanton, profligate waste of public purse money. How many of the families of those who are waiting on supports in disability and home care, scoliosis and spinal treatments or respite for carers, could understand watching money turn to smoke while they need and want so much, with nothing coming their way? We need order, responsibility and accountability. A price must be paid by those in leadership who are making these decisions. We need reform of our Civil Service Act and of our procurement procedures.

Tomorrow, I will move a Private Members' Bill, the Capital Supply Service and Purpose Report Bill, which has been undergoing scrutiny for the last six months. That report would require every Government and Minister to provide a report at the end of each year on all capital expenditure in their Department in excess of €500,000. That might be the start of offering some transparency of where spending is happening in all the Departments in the State. It might also, and this is something I would like to see, provide some evidence as to where money is being spent and where it is not being spent regionally. Certainly in the south-east region, we have much evidence of that. We need reform. We do not need talk of it, we need action and we need it now.

In the short time I have, I want to be critically constructive. The Minister of State would do well to listen to the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, which has issued an independent report on the budget stating that it is an inflationary budget. Spending from well-performing economy with extraordinary tax take, the tax take trebled in three years to €23 billion. Equally, what has almost doubled is this and the previous Government's spending on running Ireland's economy. We spent in excess of €30 billion more in a short number of years, and we have little to show for it except extensive waiting lists in every hospital waiting list one can think of. We do not have doctors in our countryside. So many people in Wexford cannot get referrals because they have no doctor.

They cannot even apply for the social welfare that is required because they cannot get a doctor's report.

What is the issue? Was it a prudent budget? No, it was a vote-buying budget. There is no doubt about that. What is the issue? The issue is the Government is not protecting the country as a whole because the FDI on which we depend so much is at risk of going. Why? Amazon told us. It said it was because of our poor planning policy and our poor investment in infrastructure. We have not invested enough in housing, energy and water and so our tax regime is no longer the most attractive thing about Ireland. Our own companies find it difficult to expand never mind FDI companies that might be thinking about expanding. Amazon was prepared to put €35 billion into the Irish economy but this money has now gone to France, Germany or Spain simply because we took our eye off the ball. We are too slow in spending and looking after the infrastructure that is required to keep our attractive economy.

We would do well to look at that but also to garner the 1.2 million people working in the SME sector. Regarding the 4% that could have been given as a reduction in VAT for the hospitality sector, the sector does not just include hoteliers, restaurateurs and café owners but also includes barbers, hairdressers and beauticians. It is a wide sector employing in excess of 280,000 people, almost a quarter of the employment within our SME sector. Those on the margins of viability could have been induced to stay in the business, but instead 700 have left, creating the possibility of a social welfare bill of €2 million per week. The Government did not look at what it has cost us not to give the reduction in VAT. It only looked at what it would cost but I think that is foolish and that we will come to rue the day when that will come back to bite us. I live in County Wexford, which is highly dependent on the revenue that comes from the tourism industry and has been affected negatively in so many ways over recent years, not just since Covid but with all the wars that have occurred and all of the things we have seen happen and the changes we have seen. We need to very much garner what we have.

Independents are always being accused of just being critical. I like to be constructive. A number of times on the floor of this House I have described several ways we can kick-start our housing builds because we are not meeting targets, which are far too low. A figure of 40,000 just does not cut it. We need to be building 60,000 homes per year. Unfortunately, the Government is not listening.

On local radio in Wexford, the Minister for Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform said no politician in this House was responsible for the overspend on the bike shed. I would hate to think the Minister actually believes that, because if he does, we are in big trouble.

I would describe wasteful spending of public money as sinful spending of public money. There is no way to accept it but it has become accepted and has become the norm. The contract for the national children's hospital was wildly inadequate. It was like a piece of string for BAM and now we are going to do the same with the national maternity hospital. The bike shed and the security cabin are the ones we know about but what about the ones we do not know about?

I have to raise the case of a local mother with two children with special needs who is still struggling to secure a school place to her youngest son. Sabrina Kelly's son, Josh, has been failed by the National Council for Special Education and the Department of Education. Five-year-old Josh was due to start school in September and was eventually offered a place at Powerstown National School near Clonmel. However, Sabrina has said that, through no fault of the school staff, it is not suitable. More people contacted my office today. People contact me daily. We saw the scoliosis people here last week.

We and the public have to grapple to understand waste when we have cases like that. Every TD in this House has had them. The Taoiseach talks about them. He has met them or has been listening to their pre-budget submissions. We are failing them and here we have a waste of money - good money after bad. In olden times, 50 people who lived in the botháns and small houses believed in waste not, want not and recycled stuff. We imagine we are a world-class economy and have more money than we can handle, but we have cases like this, a lack of dentistry and people waiting years for an appointment with a doctor and going up to Belfast for cataract treatment. It is an appalling vista and successive governments have failed to change it along with successive Secretaries General, who never have to get elected and never face the people but only water their pensions. It is unacceptable but it is not going to change under the Government's watch. I do not know if it will change under the next Government but something has to happen.

The complete waste of money is appalling, about which there is an outcry the Government is ignoring. It is quite adamant this pouch scheme is going to work. It knows as well as I do that no phone is going to go into that pouch. It is only codding us. I would like to know who is making these pouches. We need a bit more information about this because it seems the Government is determined to go ahead with a nonsensical idea.

I have been on a board of management for more than 20 years and have seen how difficult it is to pay for electricity and oil. The capitation grant is a disaster. Some schools have gone to the local priest to pull out a cheque and pay for that. The Government thinks there is no problem with this. A total of €9 million can be squandered but when it comes to paying schools' bills, it cannot do anything. I have seen people who need the summer works scheme. I spoke to people from Laragh National School in Bandon. Some great work was done by Cork County Council on the roadside but they had to do some work inside the school grounds. What did the Department tell them? It said it would not pay for it and that the school either had to do it itself or get the council to pay for it. Obviously, the council is doing the work on the outside on the road. There is now a safety issue, children could be knocked down and killed and the Department is adamant it is not going to pay for that work. More than 20 people are looking to go from Bantry to Schull on a bus. This is desperately needed transport and the Government has continually refused to provide it. The same is happening in Laragh in Bandon where the Department is refusing to put a bus on to take children to school, but €9 million can be found no problem. The Government is really putting more and more pressure on boards of management and parents' associations who desperately need extra cash and are organising cake sales, tea afternoons and coffee mornings to try to pay so that the Government can squander the money they are trying to raise. Regarding children with special needs, I know of numerous people looking for this service.

Why has this Government got so much money to spend? It is because of its tax regime. The Government loves inflation. When housing doubles in price, the Government gets the double the tax. When a house that once cost €250,000 now costs €450,000, the Government now has a tax intake of €53,524.23 in VAT if a person buys a new house. That is why the Government has the money. Schools get a small budget and have barely enough to survive. The Government will make schools very accountable and only give them a small budget, but when it comes to the Government giving out money, there is no accountability - €1.4 million for a security and €365,000 for a bike shed. There is no accountability even though the Government is taxing people out of existence. This is why the Government loves inflation. If you buy a bottle of orange today and pay €1 for it and a year later, it costs €2, you will still get the same bottle of orange but the Government will take 50% of it back in tax. That is the problem with this Government. There is no accountability and no business sense in Cabinet because none of them have ever been in business and employed people so they do not know what it is like to lose money. It is like confetti to them. They just throw it out there. A total of €9 million has been given out for phone pouches when schools are crying out for more special education teachers and more help. The Government will give it for one thing but will not give it to the people who really need help. Again, there is no accountability in Cabinet. Why? It is because they have no business sense and know nothing about it. If they were losing their own money, they would know about it.

I thank Sinn Féin for bringing this very important motion before us. However, one of the biggest wastes of money is the amount of money taken off taxpayers in the form of carbon tax. We all know what Sinn Féin did with the carbon tax. It supported it and said at the time that it was not going far enough and quickly enough.

With regard to the bike shed, I remind the people that, at the moment, the Labour Party is actively seeking a second bike shed to be built. To be clear on where it wanted it, it said there was one out the back so the leader of the party made strong representations to get one built in the front. So, let everybody know the Labour Party wants a second bike shed.

On the children's hospital, when we talk about waste, I want to know how a contractor was asked to do a job along with additional jobs that were required, gave a price of €25 million, and then a contractor came along and did it for €200,000. To be fair, there is something very radically wrong there. I am sure the person who did it for €200,000 made some type of a marginal profit out of it and they were happy to do it, but how could anybody ask for €25 million to do the same job? That is wrong.

The HSE is haemorrhaging money in everything it does. At the same time there is the staff. I compliment those working in our community hospitals in Kenmare, Dingle, Cahersiveen, Killarney, in our general hospital, and in our university hospital in Tralee. Whether they are working in catering, nursing or the general staff there, they are working very hard, but their bosses are haemorrhaging money, and that is wrong.

It is a scandal to God what has gone on. First, there was a bicycle shed at €336,000, then a hut for €1.42 million, and now pouches for €9 million while there is a shortage of SNAs and teachers in our schools. A total of €4-€5 million is spent on migration funding. Any amount of millions can be spent on climate action and it still will not change the weather. People going to work, including those operating commercial vehicles, taxis and coaches, are suffering with extra carbon tax and all the other taxes.

At the same time, there is no respite for families with children or family members with a disability. There is no funding for carers and people like the children who are suffering with scoliosis and are still waiting. We still do not have half enough GPs. It is a fright to God that people are waiting in emergency departments on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights waiting to see a consultant. Unless a person is at death’s door, many of them are not working during the weekend. I know those who are waiting and I know too well those who have waited.

Then we are expected to answer to the people. There is no answer inside in this Chamber as to what is going on. This happened under their noses just outside the door of this building. What is happening around the country? How much money is being wasted? There is an old saying that wilful waste makes woeful want. The time could be fast coming when we will need the money we have squandered and the people are depending on us to manage. The Government has totally and absolutely disregarded its own people. It is a disgrace what is happening.

I am glad of the opportunity to speak on the motion on the spending of public funds by the Government. There is no doubt this Government has mishandled the spending of public funds on so many occasions and too many to list. However, that the cost of the national children’s hospital has now risen to in excess of €2 billion is outrageous. I remember Mick Wallace, when he was a Member of this House in 2014 and 2015, saying the cost of the children’s hospital would run to more than €2 billion and he was laughed at. The Government said there was no way that would happen. Here we are today and he has been proved right. It is without doubt the biggest misuse of public funds in the history of the State and this Government should be ashamed of the fact that children in desperate need of life-saving healthcare are being forced to wait years to see its completion. Yet the Taoiseach has the audacity to claim the overspend had nothing to do with him despite him being Minister for Health between 2016 and 2020 and despite the fact he is the one who signed the contract for the hospital as Minister for Health in 2019. The hospital is turning out to be one of the world’s most expensive hospitals and one of the world’s most expensive buildings while children struggle to get basic services. It is an absolute disgrace.

Despite this, the Government claims in its amendment to this motion that the Opposition is making baseless accusations regarding the mismanagement of public funds. There is a long history and many examples of this Government’s mismanagement of funds and the public is very aware of this. Many do not trust this Government’s ability to handle public funds and invest in much-needed services, and who can blame them. The Government, in its amendment, claims it is investing significantly in mental health services and CAMHS when we know the allocation announced in the budget was not nearly enough to ensure adequate services. It claims it is providing housing while more than 14,000 people are homeless in this country and hundreds of people in Donegal watch as houses continue to crumble year after year because the Government refuses to introduce an adequate defective block scheme. It claims it is providing sufficient school funding while teachers tell us they need more support, more special needs assessments and smaller class sizes. The Government can dress its failures up all it wants but people can see through its spin. People know this mismanagement of funds will continue and nothing has changed or ever will change under Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. The people deserve a Government that works for them, that invests in public services, and that prioritises people over vulture funds, big corporations, private contractors and profit. That is what the people should aim for.

When I made my initial comments on the previous five budgets, I always made the point that it is not just how much money we spend that matters. How we spend it is crucial. The question always is whether it delivers value for money. I am not just saying that here tonight.

Sometimes we get the impression that whoever is Minister is putting their hand in their own pocket and handing out money. In fact, the job of any Government or Minister is to manage the people’s money and to deliver good outcomes for money spent. In simple terms, it is to deliver value for money.

The Government amendment tells us all about the money spent and all the different programmes that are in place, but we need to go beneath the surface and beyond the headlines. We know the spending is taking place. The taxes are coming in. We have to ask if the spending is delivering value for money. Is it giving better outcomes for our young people in education? I will look at the detail of that shortly.

I wish to comment on the other issues raised in this Sinn Féin motion. Only two weeks ago, we witnessed another price hike in the saga of escalating costs for the children’s hospital, the most expensive hospital in the world, with a price tag of €2.24 billion as of today or yesterday. That represents an estimated 373% increase on the original cost. In a way, however, many people have become accustomed to these cost increases because they have been going on for so long. It was the small money for the bicycle shed at €336,000 - in fact a great deal of money but comparatively small money - the security hut at €1.4 million and the eye-watering increase in the price of modular homes for Ukrainians from €200,000 in June 2022 to €436,000 by June 2024 that really stopped most people in their tracks. It is this sense that there is a wilful disregard for prudence and caution in spending public money. I also get from people a sense of helplessness and frustration because they keep asking who is responsible for this spending and who makes the decisions. Who knew about the decisions being made all along the line?

There are a raft of questions and very few answers. People do not expect every project to come in on budget but are in general annoyed and frustrated by what they see as a cavalier attitude to spending their money. They know, as we all know, part of the role of Government is not just to spend our tax money, but to spend it wisely and well and, above all, to take responsibility for how that money is spent. We do not see that happening. In that context, I support the amendment by Deputies Canney and Tóibín.

While Government is ultimately responsible for how money is spent and the buck stops with the Minister, any Minister has to delegate. Responsibility has to go down the line as well as up the line. Those systems of accountability have to be put in place. That is something we really need to see.

Earlier I spoke about primary school funding and the outcomes from the moneys invested. Most of the Government's amendment tells us how much has been spent. The question is whether it is well spent. Are we getting good outcomes? Our average class size is 22.8 pupils, while the European average between very wealthy and less wealthy countries is 20 pupils per class. We are way above the average. There is chronic underfunding in Government expenditure in primary schools. It is equivalent to 15% per capita GDP, compared to 27% across a number of OECD countries. I know our GDP is overstated; nonetheless, the comparison is very poor.

A couple of months back, the Catholic Primary School Management Association did a survey of schools and came up with lots of statistics. It said seven out of ten primary schools have run at a deficit at some stage over the past 12 months and that the capitation grant barely covers energy and electricity costs, never mind all the other costs schools have to cover.

Let us look at the impact on our children. The number of children with special needs increased by 56% between 2017 and 2021. How did Government respond to that? More than 16,500 children are awaiting their first appointment with children's disability network teams. There is a staff vacancy rate of over 30%. We also have 19,500 children awaiting their first assessment of need. That further adds to the difficulties special needs pupils face in schools. Those are the bread-and-butter issues for schools, pupils and families. We see some high-profile things like free meals and free books, and those are important. Parents appreciate them but we have to look at how the system is working with all of this money being spent. I have to say the picture is pretty bleak.

Many people from all walks of life have been in contact with my office about their sheer frustration and outrage at the inexcusable and colossal waste of people's money we are here to speak about. That was well before, and pre-empts, the announcement of some €9 million of the people's money on phone pouches for schools. It was in respect of a number of other embarrassing and shameful acts of throwing our money away: the bike shed, the security hut and the now infamous children's hospital. There is no doubt but there is more waste to come.

I have said before in this House and will say again there is a culture issue at play. The public needs to know that will be brought under control. The scandalous waste has turned this House into a laughing stock and the Government has made a holy show of us all. Where is the accountability? In the shadows of an impending election, that is where.

I listened to the Taoiseach's remarks this afternoon and have come to the conclusion that how we define "listening" and "delivery" are very different. He said he and his Government are "listening" and "delivering". Once-off payments are not delivery; they are sticking plasters and nothing more. One review plus another review does not equal all ears. It is actually the opposite and we learned this from the recent roll-out of the pilot school transport scheme. It removes the Minister from the issue and those impacted.

The Government speaks of massive levels of investment and that is fine. That is its prerogative but I ask Government to please stop forgetting the pits we came from and where, in fact, we still are - that is, major deficits in the basics of housing, healthcare, disability and childcare. I say on behalf of all who have no home and, therefore, no hope in sight that the Government's record on real delivery is not very mindful and not very demure.

The past four budgets have successfully balanced the dual challenge of remaining responsive to economic and social developments while ensuring the sustainability of our public finances. Budget 2025 will build on and continue the enhanced investment in recent years in our society. The budget strategy generally has been framed in the context of a growing population and elevated price levels in recent years.

As set out in the summer economic statement, the strategy for budget 2025 has a number of aims, primarily to support households and firms, deliver improvements in public services, boost the resilience of the economy and further enhance our capital development and infrastructure, including, most importantly, housing. There will be an overall investment of €105.4 billion to deliver continued improvements in infrastructure and enhance public services to build for a stronger future. That planned level of expenditure will allow for the continuation of our planned approach to public spending, focused on delivering our economic, social and climate ambitions.

Given the growing population and record number of people in employment, I am conscious of the impact of elevated prices in recent years. It was decided in the summer economic statement that the 5% anchor the Government set on itself in 2021 was not appropriate to recognise the growth and expansion of services our country needs. It is important to recognise that. Instead, the Government provided a robust response to the challenges of population growth to ensure the most vulnerable in society were protected; supports were available for individuals, families and businesses, like, in previous times, the pandemic unemployment payment and, today, cost-of-living supports; our economic support was sustained and strengthened, as is reflected in the record high numbers of people in employment in this country; and the growing population was provided for with investment at a higher level of public service provision.

That strategy has a certain flexibility in allowing for essential adjustments to overall expenditure strategy, depending on the particular sets of challenges we faced. Those challenges have been considerable over the past five years and have changed greatly. All the time, we have tried to ensure the most vulnerable could be supported and provided for while growing the economic story more generally to ensure continued employment.

Our fiscal responsibility is an absolute priority. That is why the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, has managed to restore the public finances not once but twice in that five-year period. The Government strategy has provided cost-of-living supports for those who needed them while ensuring inflation has come down from a record high of near 9% two years ago to about 1.5% now. The reality is that, although the rate has come down, prices are much higher than they were and we must reflect that in our support. We are not simply an economy and are not looking for an A+ from an economist; we are trying to support a society as well as run a successful economy.

There are important questions about how we will fund infrastructure into the future and develop the resilience of the State. A record investment of €165 billion is set out in the NDP and the Government has demonstrated its commitment to increased infrastructural investment and delivery. Capital investment in 2025 will be almost €15 billion, which is the highest annual spend to date. The Government is investing sums well above the EU norms in the current and future years of the NDP.

That is a necessary investment and nothing to be clapped on the back about. It is essential critical infrastructure development for this State. It is important it is done and important also that it is recognised quite how much capital is there to be invested in this State at the same time.

It is important to say that the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, has taken over the delivery of the NDP projects. In response to the barriers to delivery of projects in the past, there has been a series of priority actions to improve delivery of infrastructure projects. There are new infrastructure guidelines that seek to balance the requirements for rigorous assessment of complex projects with the need to reduce administrative burdens on Departments charged with infrastructure delivery. Those changes to the guidelines seek to ensure a better understanding of the drivers of cost, timeline challenges and risks on a project and to provide a more realistic cost estimate a project approver can stand over. It is important to balance the need to be rigorous with the need to deliver and the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, now personally chairs the reconstituted Project Ireland 2040 delivery board which is charged with driving the delivery of the NDP. The combination of these delivery reforms will boost the delivery of critical infrastructure.

The Government has been delivering across the breadth of public services. Examples of this include 330 school building projects in 2023 and over 1,000 schools projects since the NDP started in 2018; significant reductions in outpatient waiting lists and improved health facilities such as the National Forensic Mental Hospital in Portrane; hospital extensions and new primary care centres and community nursing units across the country; significant upgrades to Ireland’s national road network and improvements to public transport systems including BusConnects; high-quality cultural and sporting amenities such as the sports campus in Blanchardstown; and the continued progress of the national broadband plan such that over 250,000 homes have now been passed and can avail of the high-quality connectivity offered by the plan.

There is of course a continued focus on youth mental health services, which my colleague the Minister of State, Deputy Burke, has already outlined. It is very important. Budget 2025 provides 95 new posts for youth mental health services, including additional staffing for child and adult mental health services, community teams and the expansion of CAMHS hubs teams, which are essential. The budget package within 2025 of €8.8 billion has three principal components: an increase of €5.2 billion in current expenditure; €1.6 billion of capital in line with the agreed allocations under the NDP; and a €2 billion cost-of-living package.

I will deal specifically with some of the issues that have been addressed in the last number of days relating to post-primary schools, smartphone-free education and the efforts by the Minister, Deputy Foley, to try to deliver smartphone-free education to our students. It is widely accepted by this House, CyberSafeKids and a range of other contributors from both education and mental health contexts that the use of smartphones can have a genuinely negative and damaging effect on the school day. Smartphones can cause distraction, create the risk of students experiencing cyberbullying and being exposed to harmful content and reduce the opportunities for social interactions and concentration. For this reason, the Minister, Deputy Foley, has introduced a one-off, targeted measure to support post-primary schools in the free education scheme by enabling them to implement a ban on mobile phone usage throughout the day. There are more than 400,000 students enrolled across more than 700 secondary schools in Ireland, so the funding represents a once-off cost of €20 per student in post-primary school. This investment of €9 million represents less than 0.1% of the overall education budget of €11.8 billion. The funding is intended to support positive well-being among pupils and students, and help them to disconnect, concentrate and make friends without the distractions that can arise from the use of mobile phones.

The initiative mirrors similar projects adopted in other states around the world, including by the Sinn Féin-led Northern Ireland Executive, which is piloting the use of lockable pouches in Northern Irish schools. It is doing so because evidence from the OECD and the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization shows the benefits of removing mobile phone use from children in schools. We have seen educational outcomes in schools in Belgium, Spain, the UK and a whole range of other places where mobile phones have been removed from schools. In truth, there are a number of different ways to approach this. Schools in many cases have already taken steps to ensure mobile phones are removed. I was in a school in Drogheda yesterday that has taken exactly those steps. When De La Salle College in Churchtown introduced self-locking pouches, staff reported better educational outcomes from the removal of mobile phones.

This is one part of a budget of close to €12 billion allocated to the Department of Education. There are other key features that are important for children. There is some €51 million in funding to extend the free school books scheme to students in transition year and senior cycle, meaning it will now support 940,000 children in primary, special and post-primary schools in the free scheme. It does not yet support all students because there are a number of other schools that are, for religious or other reasons, not included in the scheme yet but may be some day. There has been significant increase in the school funding with State funding per pupil. Obviously the capitation rate has increased from €224 per student in primary school and from €345 to €386 per student in post-primary school. There has been an additional €45 million in cost-of-living supports for schools in the free scheme to help them to deal with increased costs. Most importantly, there will be 768 special education teachers and 1,600 SNAs to support children across mainstream, special classes and special schools. In total, there will be over 44,000 dedicated staff to support children with special education needs in our schools.

The reason people are absolutely shocked by the spending of €9 million on mobile phone pouches, which is almost hard to put into words, is because I am assuming everyone here is constantly contacted by parents and families of those with disabilities and autism who are dealing with the fact that there are not enough places at either primary or secondary level. We do not have enough autism units. There are the small businesses that have gone to the wall. We have even seen the schools that find a difficulty in drawing down the necessary moneys. I will be dealing with some of these issues tomorrow as a Topical Issue.

There is a long, long list of public spending disasters. There has been €2.2 billion spent on the most expensive hospital in the world with no end in sight and no end date. There has been €336,000 spent on a bike shed. There has been €1.4 million spent on a security hut with an impressive roof; the roof is very important. Modular homes that were planned to cost €200,000 are going to end up at €442,000. Everyone accepts there are issues with inflation and there will always be extras and anomalies. We talk now of how we are going to review the process of how the OPW was enabled to see if we could even just talk about one of these things. We talk about the bike shed and say we might have a problem here and we might need to hit the brakes, but none of that happens. We will constantly do what always happens with government, which is that we will talk about learnings.

The phone pouches are being sold as a mental health intervention, but the particular issues that exist in relation to mental health go without saying. I have brought up the need for more staff for the mental health services in Louth and Meath, the need for a ten-bed extension that must be delivered, the fact there is a huge level of 55 or possibly more full-time staff who are not in place and the lack of a proper assessment facility in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital. I could go on about all the lists related to CAMHS. This is a disaster and it needs to be walked back from, but we need to get a handle on the misspending of public money by the Government.

This motion put forward by Sinn Féin is an opportunity to say "Stop" and to stop the waste. It a chance to inject a bit of common sense into the Ministers of State opposite me and a bit of humility into them, maybe. Unlike the bike shed, where the Government wasted €336,000; unlike the security hut, where it spent €1.4 million; and unlike the runaway train that is the national children's hospital, which is now the most expensive hospital in the world as it is running at €2.2 billion and counting, and is €1.5 billion over budget, this money has not yet been wasted.

The sum of €9 million for mobile phone pouches, dressed up as a mental health initiative, is not only a waste of money - it is insulting to the many parents and children out there who have mental health issues. Since I raised this issue on Thursday I have been inundated with young people, and those who are not too young, telling me their stories of being on that list, perhaps as one of the 4,000 children who are waiting for an appointment with CAMHS or one of the 500 children who have been waiting for more than a year for such an appointment. People have spoken to me about how they attempted to take their own lives because they did not have the services or supports when they were reaching out. They find it insulting that the Minister is announcing €9 million for mobile phone pouches as a mental health initiative while at the same time injecting less than €3 million in additional support for CAMHS. It is insulting, given that we have 4,000 people waiting on those lists.

Teachers have also been reaching out to us to tell us they have trouble keeping the lights on, paying the bills and being able to make sure schools are heated. It is not only Sinn Féin calling out the Government for the lack of investment in education. We know that the OECD has also called out our level of investment. Ireland has one of the lowest levels of investment in education in Europe. At secondary level, in particular, the Teachers Union of Ireland has said that the funding situation is dire.

This is an opportunity because every single TD will have a chance to vote here. The simple proposition that is being put forward is to stop wasting public money like the Government did with the bike shed, the security hut and the rapid-build modular houses that were supposed to be built for €200,000 but ended up costing €420,000. Let us see a bit of common sense and humility from the Government. Let us stop this waste. Let us invest in proper mental health services that can support the children who need it.

Much has been said during this debate about the ongoing waste of public money. I thank everybody who took part in the debate. I would like to get answers to a few questions. Does the Government think it is value for money to pay €9 million for mobile phone pouches? Was it value for money to pay €336,000 for a bike shed? Was it value for money to pay €440,000 for a modular home? Was it value for money to spend €1.4 million on a security hut? Was it value for money to have to spend €4.3 million as a result of not paying bills on time? This is before I mention the never-ending cost overruns associated with the children's hospital project, which was signed off by the Taoiseach, Simon Harris. There is no accountability in this Government. The Government amendment means that it is simply incapable of listening to ordinary workers and families. Instead, we have a Government spending €9 million on mobile phone pouches that nobody wants. Why can children not keep their phones in their lockers? My kids do this in their school. Why can they not keep them in their bags or simply be asked to turn them off? This costs nothing. This is common sense and the thing about common sense is that it is not very common when it comes to this Government.

Its decision to propose this amendment today tells me that the Government is simply not listening. It is not listening to children who are languishing on mental health waiting lists. It is not listening to children who are waiting for assessments of need. The Government is not listening to children who cannot get special education places. It is not listening to children who are on waiting lists for speech and language therapy. It is not listening to parents who contact my office daily because their children are being failed.

I reiterate that I did not make this debate on spending €9 million on mobile phone pouches about mental health - the Government did. I will remind the Government of its record on mental health. The Government's amendment states it "will build on progress in reducing CAMHS waiting lists". What progress? Since this Government came into office, there has been a 74% increase in the number of young people waiting for a first-time appointment for CAMHS. Today, there are 504 children waiting for over a year for a first-time appointment for CAMHS. That is a 126% increase under this Government's watch. A child in mental health distress has to stay on a waiting list for more than a year before being seen for a first-time appointment. He or she may need to wait for added therapies after that initial wait has come to an end. That is what this Government is presiding over. It is not listening to those people.

Damning reports into CAMHS by Maskey and by the Mental Health Commission found that children are being misdiagnosed, mistreated and lost in the system. There were 72 CAMHS beds when this Government took office in 2020; there are 51 beds open today. It is scandalous that 18,368 children are waiting for an appointment for primary care psychology today. This is a 90% increase under this Government's watch.

The legacy of this Government is one of heartbreak and of children being denied every opportunity to reach their full potential. Can the Government stand over its record? Can it justify to parents spending €9 million on mobile phone pouches? Can it justify not putting this money into vital mental health supports? The Sinn Féin motion represents a key opportunity for this Government to admit its failures and listen to people. It is not the first time the Government has failed to take such an opportunity. A Government that fails to listen to its citizens is a Government that is no longer fit to govern.

Let us get off the fence, stop the charade, call the election and the people judge the Government on its failures in housing, health, the cost of living, mental health and the waste of public money. It is time for change. Sinn Féin is ready, willing and able to deliver the change the Government is incapable of giving.