I welcome the opportunity to speak on this important Bill. I will be sharing time with my colleagues Deputies Conor Sheehan and George Lawlor. It is a short Bill at just ten pages and comprising ten section, but it is of real and critical significance to our economy and our society. The infrastructure deficit in our country is perhaps the biggest single economic challenge we have. As the Minister recounted earlier, the IMF has estimated that Ireland is looking at an infrastructure deficit, or physical infrastructure gap, of about 32% relative to the economies that we compare ourselves against. The quality gap is 27%. To make a political point, that is the legacy of underinvestment from successive Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil Governments and it has left us lagging behind. Successive Governments over the last ten years have, frankly, been crippled by their own conservatism and they have shown a risk aversion to engaging in the kinds of developments we require to move our economy along, to address our climate challenge and to improve our society. Nobody here needs a history lesson. We know that we have had at least ten years of real problems where, due to the economic collapse, we simply did not have the resources to provide the infrastructure this country requires, but we have had the resources since 2016 and few efforts were made to address that deficit and the gap. Those chickens are coming home to roost. I said before the last election, and it was not a pithy throwaway remark, that based on our experience the biggest threat to the Irish economic model was not the return of Donald Trump to the White House but the re-election of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. I am pleased to see, however, that there is at least a new impetus and a new focus on the delivery of the infrastructure we require in this country. We have managed to waste a boom over the last decade. A lot of the social and economic problems we are experiencing now, and the challenges that households and businesses are facing, are a direct result of that. We are sitting on record tax receipts but we have allowed our infrastructure gap to widen and widen. This is not an abstract point or an abstract debate. The infrastructure gap and its implications are something that every citizen of this country sees and experiences every day, such as the hospital wings that have been promised but not delivered, the bridges that are never built, the renewable energy resources that were promised and have yet to materialise, and the houses that will not be completed because the necessary water systems are not there. An infrastructure deficit is, more than anything else, what holds people back from living the best lives they can. I say it time and again that this is what makes Ireland a rich country that at the same time feels so poor. This is the Irish contradiction and the Irish dilemma: a rich country that feels so poor. We are very poor when it comes to the infrastructure that we have available. We are entitled to expect better in this rich country but we do not have it. It has been encouraging in the last few months to see a Government that is finally engaging on this issue and getting serious about infrastructure. It is long overdue but the analysis of the problem and the solutions proposed in the accelerating infrastructure report did show a Government that is getting serious about tackling this problem. As the Minister will know, that initiative was welcomed by the Labour Party. It would be easy for those of us in opposition to decry every Government report and every Government initiative and use the routine response that not enough is being done and so on. That initiative was evidence that there was a renewed interest in developing infrastructure and taking a new approach. As a party that cares about this country and is genuinely patriotic, we know that if this works and if the Government manages to deliver the housing, the health services, the critical infrastructure and the renewable energy we need, our country will do better and the Government will be judged on delivery. That brings us to today's Bill. The idea proposed here is a simple one, that the Government should be able to point to a certain project and say, "This project is very important for all of our society", and therefore direct its various agencies and Departments to prioritise and work together to get a particular project over the line. On the face of it this simple idea seems like a sensible one. A citizen watching us today spending several hours debating this Bill might very well ask, "Well, why is this not happening already?". They would certainly be entitled to wonder whether it really requires primary legislation for the Government to be able to tell public bodies - the public bodies that are our accountable to this House and accountable to the Minister and funded by the taxpayer - to prioritise a certain project. What we have seen today is actually a failure of politics, a failure of leadership, a failure of governance and a failure of management. People will be entitled to ask if this is the answer to the problems and whether this is really the Government's solution to one of the most pressing challenges we face as a country by making a law to allow itself to ask or request public bodies to hurry up a bit. If this is the extent of the ambition on infrastructure we will see over the next three years, then many citizens are entitled to be worried. They might also ask whether, if this Bill had been passed five years ago or ten years ago, we would have an open and fully functioning national children's hospital by now. Would we be able to step outside Leinster House and get onto a metro to the airport, or would the systemic issues hampering and delaying these projects and so many others have remained in spite of this legislation? I will turn now to a serious point that my colleague Deputy Sheehan will elaborate on later. Buried in this Bill are potentially significant constitutional issues that may arise, and in our view will arise, which risk leaving this legislation exposed to challenge. I am talking about section 7, which disapplies section 15 of the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act from designated projects and programmes, as the Minister outlined earlier. I looked very carefully at some of the countervailing measures and legislation in terms of publishing orders and bringing all those orders to the House, effectively putting them in the Oireachtas Library, and procedurally trying to make sure that the Minister follows a particular process to try, insofar as he can, to make this legislation bulletproof. I suspect, however, that it is not possible to do that in this legislation and I think there are flaws here. This is a step beyond simply instructing public bodies to prioritise and co-ordinate the fast-tracking of projects. It seems that what the Government is proposing here is to give the Executive the power to disapply the public body duty under the climate action Acts to perform public functions consistent with achieving the State's climate goals. Taken with the backsliding we have seen today, for example on the collection of carbon duties, this Government's commitment on climate action is very much in doubt. We could see the State's biggest and most significant infrastructure projects being exempted from climate considerations altogether, despite what the Minister said in his remarks and his claims to the contrary with regard to other sections of the legislation. In effect, this legislation would undermine the letter, spirit and tone of the 2015 Act itself. It is not clear to me where this proposal has come from. Maybe if pre-legislative scrutiny had not been waived, we could have got to the bottom of this. I can only conclude there was a fear that if pre-legislative scrutiny got under way, this aspect of the legislation would be exposed and brought to further public attention. It is not a measure that was recommended in the Accelerating Infrastructure report. In fact, that report speaks glowingly of our commitment to climate targets, as it should. We should not allow ourselves to fall into the trap of thinking we can prioritise either climate action or infrastructure delivery. We can do both. I have been critical before of the way this Government is thinking about its infrastructure agenda. We are repeatedly seeing this type of binary thinking that pits climate against delivery and that should not be the case. I have said it in the House to the Minister and others that there appeared to be in the Accelerating Infrastructure report a fixation on judicial review and clouding of the picture. There was intense media interest in the judicial review aspects of the report as well. What seems to be proposed here is something that involves a risk that could deny citizens their rights to access justice under binding international agreements like the Aarhus Convention. That is something we need to be extremely mindful of.

Sentiment score: 0.06