Niall Collins (Limerick County, Fianna Fail)
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I am sharing time with Deputy James O’Connor.

I am glad to have the opportunity to speak on the budget, which we were apprised of this week by the Ministers, Deputies Donohoe and Chambers. I congratulate both Ministers on their presentations and in particular, my colleague Deputy Chambers who presented his first budget to the House as Minister for Finance and, indeed, our deputy leader.

By any yardstick, we need to stand back and look at the breadth and scale of the budget that was unveiled and give due recognition and due regard to the people of Ireland who put our country in the place where we could deliver a budget of such magnitude across so many areas of expenditure. This is at a time we can look across the globe and see the impact of globalisation, the geopolitical unrest around the world and the disruption it is causing so many economies that are experiencing economic downturns or recessions and that find themselves in economically straitened times. We find ourselves in a polar opposite situation. That is down to every man, woman and child in this country and how the country has worked its way through the past few years especially. We worked our way through Covid, bounced back strongly out of Covid with a really strong, buoyant economy so much so that we experienced, unfortunately, on the back of the war in Ukraine, a huge spike in inflation, which brought cost-of-living issues. Thankfully we were in a position to address this due to the buoyancy of our Exchequer returns. We have seen year-on-year surpluses. The prudent approach by this Government has been to provide for the future through the Future Ireland Fund and the infrastructure fund. These are two very prudent rainy day funds into which we are putting significant resources. Were we to experience a downturn or slowdown in our growth and of our economy in the future, we will have that money to call on for a rainy day fund and particularly for capital projects. If we learned one lesson from the previous economic crash and the recession that followed, it was that we lost a decade in house building. That is a great priority area for this Government. We have sought to address the huge deficit in our housing stock up and down the country. We lost almost ten years. We were constrained by the troika and by borrowing limits and the amount that we could borrow and the amount we could spend. It is a pity that during those years a mechanism was not found through which we could have borrowed specifically outside that mechanism for infrastructure to keep house building going. That was one of the big lessons from all this for me.

We are in a really good situation. We do have huge challenges. We are trying to ramp up capacity in our hospitals and our construction sector and deal with issues like homelessness. We will never be without our challenges and our problems but thankfully we are in a position where we have the resources to deal with these. Our challenges relate to capacity now. We have full employment and buoyant Exchequer returns. The future of this country is in a really good place. It behoves this Government and the next and the next set of people elected to this Parliament to form a government to maintain that responsible and progressive approach to how we prudently spend our money and plan for our future despite all the challenges.

I will speak in particular on the Department I am assigned to, namely the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science. It is the sixth highest spending Department with a top line budget of approximately €4.6 billion. When the Department was created back in July 2020, we set about trying to reform the further education sector in particular. Our universities were on a very good footing and in a very good place. They had a bit of an issue with funding but we have secured the funding for their future to keep them in the very positive place that they are globally and to try to improve their global and European rankings.