Dáil Éireann debate -
Tuesday, 9 Jul 2024

I really appreciate that. I take this opportunity to offer my sincere condolences to the family of John O'Mahony. My thoughts and prayers are with his wife, Gerardine, and their five daughters, as well as the wider family and friends, including his wider family in the GAA and the Fine Gael Party. I offer my condolences to the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, and all his colleagues. I served with John in the Seanad and always found him to be an absolute gentleman. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam dílis.

It will be no surprise that my first question is about the summer economic statement, which was issued today. In particular, I ask about how much of the budget package will be allocated to new measures. Why is the general Government balance not outlined as it normally is in the summer economic statement?

The summer economic statement demonstrates the Government’s ongoing commitment to provide for high-quality public services and better societal outcomes in a manner that is consistent with the safe management of our public finances. It is another key milestone in our budgetary timetable, setting out our strategy for the year ahead and providing an outline of the resources that are available for budget 2025.

Total voted expenditure is set to grow by €6.9 billion, or 6.9%, to a gross voted expenditure ceiling of €105.4 billion. This increase is made up of a €5.5 billion, or 6.4%, uplift in total voted current expenditure and a €1.4 billion, or 10.6%, uplift in total voted capital expenditure. A key element of the overall expenditure amount for 2025 is agreement in relation to the level of health funding for 2025.

A key element of the overall expenditure amount for 2025 is agreement in relation to the level of health funding for next year. Taking into account demands for better quality healthcare, the complexity of providing health services, the legacy impact of a post pandemic and heightened inflationary environment, significant additional funding is being provided to the Department of Health. An additional €1.5 billion is being provided for health services this year, with a further €1.2 billion allocated for 2025 for existing level of service, ELS, costs. This additional funding has been agreed with the Minister for Health and the HSE and all parties have agreed it provides an opportunity to strengthen financial planning and governance within the HSE, recognising the importance of demonstrating the link between funding and the delivery of improved outcomes.

The €1.2 billion for health in 2025 forms part of an overall total settlement of €3.7 billion that will be made available to cover the costs associated with day-to-day spending. I have already referred to where we are with capital investment. In terms of new measures, the figure is €1.8 billion on budget day.

With regard to the Deputy's final question, I understand that the budget package that we have confirmed for 2025 still gives a general Government balance for next year of approximately €6 billion. That can be confirmed to the Deputy tomorrow evening at the Committee on Budgetary Oversight. I understand the Department of Finance will provide the general Government balance for the years after that when it has revised its tax forecasts, which it will do as part of the preparation for budget 2025.

I look forward to the meeting of the Committee on Budgetary Oversight tomorrow evening. I am sure the Minister understands why we need the figures for the budget preparation.

I refer to what the Minister stated is provided for health. He is providing €1.5 billion in funding for the health service this year. That will be in the base for 2025, but the Government is then providing an existing level of service funding of €1.2 billion. For more than a year, Sinn Féin has rightly called out the Government's deliberate underfunding of the health service. That is something that was sharply criticised as well by both the Fiscal Advisory Council and the CEO of the HSE. The latter warned at the time of the last budget that it posed a significant punitive risk to the public and that has proven to be the case. Our claim that the health budget was a work of fiction, with damaging consequences for patients and staff, has been vindicated in this budget. Today's announcement shows the underfunding and mismanagement of the health budget. I welcome the fact that the Minister is putting it right, but it does prove the case that last year's budget was wrong for the health service.

Last year's budget represented the highest level of funding that has ever been provided to the Department of Health. At that point, more than €6 billion of additional funding was provided to it, compared with where we were in 2019. What has happened since is that the level of additional health expenditure in the first half of this year exceeded any expectations that I could have had. This was driven by a number of factors, not least of which has been the continued attendance of a high number of older patients in particular in emergency departments at a level that is now materially affecting the spending we have for health within the year.

I have many years of experience of managing the health budget with the Minister, Deputy Stephen Donnelly, and with previous Ministers for Health. We handled the health budget for last year no differently from how we handled it in any other year. What has happened however is the level of additional spending has been at a higher level for demographic and healthcare reasons. It is also due to control issues that we continue to have in the acute hospital sector. The framework that we have put in place offers the opportunity to deal with that.

What has been announced today for the health service does not provide for any measures to increase capacity or improve services: it simply allows it to stand still. The capital budget outlined in the statement leaves the budget short by €1.5 billion, based on the targets of the national development plan, in terms of the 5% of GNI*.

Sinn Féin wanted to see a change of course on housing in response to the Housing Commission's report. The report called for a radical reset of housing policy, yet we do not see any additional capital there. I know the summer economic statement just provides the parameters for the budget. I accept that €8.3 billion overall sounds like a lot but less has been allocated for new measures. In last year's statement it was €2 billion compared with €1.8 billion this year. When we look at the size of the budget, a modest €12 increase to pensions cost more than €500 million. In the summer economic statement, the Government claims that it has been successful in addressing the impact of inflation in public infrastructure. I do not believe that to be the case.

Deputy Conway-Walsh made a call for more capital spending, more money for the health service and more money for social protection. They are just three of the items she listed. All of those would very considerably add to the size of the overall budget package, which already proposes spending growth of 6.9% compared with a year ago. The bigger the Deputy makes the package, in the way she proposes, the greater the risk that we begin to fund permanent increases in expenditure out of tax receipts that I am convinced will not be around forever, and we should not rely on them. That is a legitimate point of difference between the two of us. Deputy Conway-Walsh is obviously entitled to take a different view on whether the surplus we have is permanent. I do not believe it is, but if the Deputy goes down the path she proposes, my honest assessment is that she will be relying on day-to-day spending and baking into permanent expenditure money that will not be permanent. I strongly urge the House not to go down that path again.

As this is my final exchange of this priority question I hope the Acting Chair will indulge me when I thank the Deputy for her very gracious words on the passing of somebody who was a great gentleman, a wonderful parliamentarian and a great representative of Mayo. Due to my duties here this evening and tomorrow, I cannot attend the ceremony, but I greatly appreciate the words the Deputy offered.

My question follows on from the previous one. If we take housing as an example, the Housing Commission states that need to almost double the number of houses we deliver each year. If I understand what the Minister says in the summer economic statement, there is only going to be €1.4 billion in additional capital spending. Last year's housing package was €5 billion. How on earth are we going to get up to the level of housing output necessary to meet what the Housing Commission expects the housing needs of this country to be in future years if all that is available in this budget is €1.4 billion? It just does not add up, and it suggests, in the context of the key area we must address, that there is not going to be enough in the budget to deal with the dire housing crisis we face. That is one example. I could talk about health and other areas.

Deputy Boyd Barrett refers to a figure of only €1.4 billion. He should take a step back and listen to what he said. Is that all he can offer? He says it is only €1.4 million more. Do his words not feel hollow to him? What we are doing is proposing to increase by more than 10% the amount of capital spending we have within the year compared with where we are at the moment. The economy is at full employment. The construction sector is struggling to get and keep the people it needs to turn higher spending into more homes. Yet, all Deputy Boyd Barrett has to offer is to say that an increase of more than 10%, of €1.4 billion, is not enough. What kind of increases is the Deputy proposing? Where is he going to get the money for it? How does he propose to increase spending by so much more than that and not cause a massive increase in inflation and the economy to overheat in the most traditional way that we know can be happen, namely by pumping money into an economy that does not have the ability to absorb it?

I know Deputy Boyd Barrett is going to say that he will fund it from a lower surplus or higher taxes for big companies. On the one hand, he rails against big companies and globalisation but, on the other hand, it is the solution for him for spending all the money he says is easily there to spend.

I could take Deputy Boyd Barrett through the answer I have here. I have already shared so much of it with Deputy Conway-Walsh that I do not think there is a need to take the House through it again. I go back to where I began. I do not know where Deputy Boyd Barrett is coming from on these matters but the last time I checked, and increase of €1.4 billion is an awful lot of additional money to spend in a year. It is being used in so many different ways. One of the main ways it is being used is to enable the building of homes.

-----but it does not answer the question. The Housing For All targets were for 33,000 houses a year. The Government does not want to debate what the Housing Commission has said, although it promised weeks ago that it would debate it. There is reason it does not want to debate it before the end of term. Including the deficit of 250,000 houses and future demand, the Housing Commission states that we need 60,000 houses a year. That is almost a doubling of current housing output. The commission also states that a very large part of this has to be social and affordable housing. If the social and affordable housing provided in 2024 was 9,300, then to get up to the level the Housing Commission is proposing we would need to pretty much double this social and affordable housing output. Last year's budget for housing was €5.1 billion. How do we double social and affordable housing output and general housing output with a fraction of what was invested last year? Yes, a wealth tax would allow us to fund it in a way that would not overheat the economy.

We would get to that point in the same way as we do with many other targets. We would do it step by step. Despite Deputy Boyd Barrett's best hopes and ambitions, we do not live in a centrally planned economy. We do not live in an economy in which there is only one thing in respect of which we have to make progress. We have to build more homes. We also have to build more schools. We also have to build better infrastructure, better gas, better electricity and better water to allow more homes to be built.

How are we going to do that? We are going to do it step by step. How are we not going to do? By means of the type of explosion that Deputy Boyd Barrett appears to be proposing, funded by the very companies and individuals he rails against all the time, he would look to do it all in a single go. Can he accept that there is merit in doing this step by step? He might state that it will take time to get there. I accept that it will, but we would get to it in a way we are confident we can afford without leading to the large increase in inflation that we could face if we were to go ahead with what is, I think, Deputy Boyd Barrett's plan, which is to do it all in a big bang or a single go.

How will we get there? We will get there gradually. We will get there step by step in the same way we have done over the past seven years. We have seen capital investment go from approximately €4 billion to the level it is at present. It has also multiplied, and we have done it phase by phase and step by step.

The step-by-step approach to addressing the housing crisis has left us with a deficit of 250,000 houses and record numbers of people who are homeless. Those numbers are growing every month. Approximately 100,000 households on housing lists have been waiting for ten, 15 or 20 years. There is a great deal of mystery. It is not us but the Housing Commission which says that a radical reset is necessary. Nobody is saying it can be done in a year. It is saying it could be done over ten years but that it has to start now and that we have to double the output. The Minister is absolutely right that we can add to this list water infrastructure, public transport and schools that need to be built. My point is that there is not enough in what the Minister is proposing to even begin the ten-year step towards addressing this problem. There is a way the Minister can do it and find the money without increasing inflation. It is not just us who are saying this. Oxfam estimates that a small wealth tax could raise €9 billion a year. We are more modest in our budget proposal of an additional €5 billion a year. This could fund it without overheating the economy and it would address the desperate housing situation we face.

Yes, but if we were to increase it, you would be against that as well. All you have to offer is a solution that you admit has not been done before. As the Housing Commission says, this needs to be done in phases and this is what we will do. As I have said already, we have shown our ability to increase capital investment in such a way that is the reason, while acknowledging the great difficulty that so many face in looking for a home, we have seen housing commencement and housing output, in particular during the first three months of this year, get to a place that many, including I am sure Deputy Boyd Barrett, thought would never happen. It is happening, and we are going to continue with that progress.

What plans does the Minister have to extend the remit of the Comptroller and Auditor General to public bodies such as RTÉ? As soon as the RTÉ scandal broke we in Sinn Féin called on the Government to bring the broadcaster under the remit of the Comptroller and Auditor General, the State auditor. When will this be done?

I thank Deputy Conway-Walsh. On 7 May last, the Government agreed in principle to the recommendation of the expert advisory committee which conducted the review of the governance and culture of RTÉ to assign the Comptroller and Auditor General as auditor of RTÉ. The Minister Deputy Catherine Martin, in a statement accompanying the publication of the expert advisory committee review, confirmed she would begin work immediately to implement the recommendations which require action by her Department. As part of this, she set out her intention to prepare and bring detailed proposals to Government to reform the legislation governing RTÉ, including to assign the Comptroller and Auditor General as auditor of RTÉ.

The reassignment of the Comptroller and Auditor General requires legislative amendments to the Broadcasting Act 2009. It also requires a significant amendment to the Comptroller and Auditor (Amendment) Act 1993, which I can make by ministerial order or directly through primary legislation. The Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media is working to establish the most effective means to implement this recommendation. I understand the Minister will bring forward the general scheme of a Bill in autumn to give effect to this and other legislative recommendations of the review.

In relation to commercial State bodies in general, Deputy Conway-Walsh is aware that section 1438 of the Companies Act 2014 provides that companies not trading for the gain of their members may be audited by the Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General, while only regulated private sector audit firms can act as statutory auditors for companies, including public enterprises, that have been set up for commercial gain under the Companies Acts. The extension of the Comptroller and Auditor General's remit to audit commercial public bodies that have other audit arrangements in place needs to be considered on a case-by-case basis by each Minister. Following such a review, if he or she considers it appropriate, a Minister can bring the body under the remit of the Comptroller and Auditor General in the way I have indicated.

It is very important this is done. It is important that it is done in conjunction with the future funding model of RTÉ. There is no better form of financial oversight and it would immediately increase the transparency and accountability needed to restore confidence. This is why we produced the necessary legislation in the weeks following the scandal. It is a simple and direct measure.

I was surprised in the media committee, when I put it to the chief executive of RTÉ, that the Government had not been in touch about RTÉ coming under the remit of the Comptroller and Auditor General. That should happen more quickly. We should not be waiting to see what should happen.

Sinn Féin has been clear about how we would reform the funding and how we would have oversight in RTÉ. I welcome that the position has somewhat changed in respect of extending the remit of the Comptroller and Auditor General to RTÉ since I first raised it with the Minister. However, it is decision time now on RTÉ. There should be no more reports or delays. The public wants to see a plan in place and the Government promised that plan would be in place before the summer recess. That is why holding on until the autumn or later is not what people expect.

The Minister, Deputy Catherine Martin, and I are engaging with one another on the future funding of RTÉ. The aim of the Government is to reach a decision on the matter before the end of this month.

With regard to the enhanced oversight arrangements, as I said in my answer a moment ago, my understanding is that the Minister will bring forward the legislation to implement this recommendation, but it will take a little longer. The general scheme will be brought forward in the autumn of this year. That will be a significant moment in changing the oversight and governance arrangements around RTÉ. The Minister is working hard to do so at the moment.

I welcome that it is happening, but it should happen this week to give the Dáil and the media committee a chance to debate the proposal.

Sinn Féin has called on the Government to scrap the television licence, as the Minister will be aware, and to fund RTÉ and other broadcast services directly because the TV licence is outdated and regressive. It is wrong that people are dragged through the courts for not paying for a TV licence when no one was held accountable for the misuse of public money in RTÉ. There is no excuse for the Government not to take action or not to treat this as urgent. When we asked questions last week, we heard again that more and more people are not paying for their TV licences. The gap in funding in RTÉ is a serious matter and we cannot provide more funding without having the accountability and transparency that would be provided by RTÉ coming under the remit of the State auditor, the Comptroller and Auditor General.

The Government is committed to bringing forward enhanced accountability. I have just informed the Dáil of the timeline for the Minister, Deputy Catherine Martin, to bring forward that legislation. On the Deputy's view and that of her party on the abolition of the television licence, I do not understand the argument that the funding gap that is currently in RTÉ will be improved by the abolition of a licence that the majority of people still pay for. I cannot understand the logic of that.

We have a licence for which the majority of people still pay, despite all the difficulty in RTÉ and Sinn Féin's view is that the funding situation will be improved by the abolition of a charge that most people, albeit reluctantly, are still willing to pay. I do not understand that approach or why it would improve where we are. I have heard again and again the case for credible, long-term funding for RTÉ and other public media. It appears that we would be moving away from that, if we were to get rid of a charge that still provides needed funding for RTÉ.