Irish taxpayers will be paying for the entire National Development Plan, for the first time in the State's history, the Dáil has been told.
During a row about spending - with just 65 minutes to debate the €184 billion plan - Labour finance spokeswoman Joan Burton said: "This is not a plan which will be sent by post to Brussels." Previously EU funding was provided for national plans, but this time, "our taxpayers will pay for the next seven years".
Green Party spokesman John Gormley said the plan had not been "climate change proofed" which was the "biggest challenge facing humanity".
Minister for Finance Brian Cowen described the plan as setting out "a vision of how Ireland can be transformed over the next seven years and how we can provide a better quality of life for all. It is an ambitious, fully costed multi-annual blueprint for sustainable development". Unlike previous national plans, this "has not been prepared to meet EU requirements" and draw down the limited structural funds now available to Ireland, he said.
He warned however "the plan can only become a reality if the economy generates the necessary resources. The success of the plan will be determined by the continuation of sound economic and budgetary policies". Fine Gael's finance spokesman Richard Bruton said, however, that the real issue was whether the Government had the capacity to deliver, because other strategies had not been delivered.
Less than 30 per cent of the 2001 health strategy had been delivered, he said. Less than 40 per cent of housing strategy targets had been met.
He stressed that this plan "is not a gift from Government. It will be funded in its entirety out of taxpayers' money. Approximately €120,000 for every family will be invested in the plan".
Labour's enterprise spokesman Ruairí Quinn said the plan "fits into the straitjacket of the expenditure profiles that Brussels demands. It has even adopted a seven-year timeframe, which is an arbitrary timeframe related to the EU budgetary process and not to Ireland's needs".
Green party finance spokesman Dan Boyle said the plan should be treated cynically because it was a "nakedly political document, the longest election manifesto in the history of Irish politics". It was a coalition plan and "hardly a plan of the Irish people for the Irish people". What was presented by the Minister as a fully costed document "is nothing of the sort".
Séamus Healy (Ind, Tipperary South) said it was unacceptable that "despite the hundreds of billions of euro allocated under this and the last plan, 890 people are unemployed out of a total population of 5,000" in Carrick-on-Suir, a 25 per cent rate.
Catherine Murphy (Ind, Kildare North) pointed out that childcare was "heavily dependent on building facilities, but the underlying costs have not been addressed" in the plan.
Seán Crowe (SF, Dublin South-West) said that "while the plan is not a genuinely national, fully integrated all-Ireland development plan which we would like, this must be a goal for any future plan".
