Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

When it comes to expenditure cuts, if people say not to cut social welfare and public service wages, that leaves one with approximately €22 billion in which to do all the cutting. If one does that, the result is Garda cars with no petrol and hospitals with no bandages because one cannot keep taking the money out of the service delivery area and leave all the rest intact. They are the hard facts.

I welcome the debate because it provides an opportunity for Members to tell us how they intend to make up the €4 billion. Every day we hear groups agreeing the cuts are necessary but not to cut them, please. That is not the reality. Therefore, we have some difficult decisions to make. It is important that in the debate speakers put the figures on the table. I would love for Members to point out where in the Book of Estimates we should change the figures and how they would make the saving. It is great to talk in generic terms, as Fine Gael often does, about eliminating waste. However, every time we present a budget Estimate to Fine Gael Members and ask them to show us the waste and suggest where to make cuts, they always disagree and say such a scheme is a marvellous one and that the cut should not be made there. They suddenly find that there is not as much waste to be eliminated from the system as they claimed. It is important for Members of the Opposition to say where the waste is and under what heading, and that one can provide the same service by reducing the budget head by such an amount. That is what it comes down to at the end of the day.

When one does it that way one then has to face up to the reality that it is not that easy and that one has to make the hard decisions. Then the Opposition will find its own Members arguing, as they do with us all the time, that no heading should be cut, that all the savings should be made in a vague theoretical exercise to eliminate waste without ever identifying where they see the waste. If there is waste in the system, it might not be so easy to eliminate it. I am talking about waste one can eliminate. It is an impossible notion that one will ever get a perfect system with workers who are perfectly efficient, do everything in a perfect way and there is no waste, or that we would have more than 250,000 people working in the public service always focusing on the work. Life is not like that. There is a certain amount of inefficiency.

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