Noel Dempsey has been a long time minister (1997) in the current Fianna
Fail regime. He was around when Mary Harney used a helicopter to travel to
a pub opening. He was in Leinster House when Ivor the Driver was motoring
to and from Bantry. He must know about the Senator Larry Butler affaire
regarding the Foxrock and Kilkenny residences of the venerable senator. He
must have known about Dr Reilly’s overnights in town when he lives in North
Dublin.

Leo Varadkar represents the near neighbours of Noel Dempsey in Dublin 15,
yet he travelled to Donegal using a €55 flight to Derry Airport and a lift
the 94 km to Glenties. Dempsey sent his Garda car and driver to Derry
Airport to collect him from the government jet flight from Dublin and
deliver him to Glenties, then back to Derry Airport for a flight to London.
The cost of this was €7800 for the jet. Dempsey had the Garda drive 500 km
in an empty car. Dempsey wasted €166 million on PPARS and dismissed it on
radio. He wasted further millions (about 35) on E-voting machines.
He is dictatorial in his attitudes and even last week was telling his Meath
constituency that the Dunboyne to Navan railway would go ahead even though
it is not listed in the revised infrastructure plan set out last week by
the government.
Dempsey is quoted in the Herald as saying “The meeting (in London) was a
very important one and in this instance it was the best, most
effective and probably the only way I could do it.”
Dempsey never heard of taxis!

OLIVIA KELLY

DEVELOPERS ARE facing severe restrictions on the construction of high-rise
buildings in Dublin city following the introduction of the new Dublin City
Development Plan next year.

City councillors last night agreed to ban the construction of buildings
above 28m (92ft) – about half the height of Liberty Hall – unless a
statutory plan called a Local Area Plan (Lap) was drafted for the area in
question. Such a plan could take several years to develop.

This would block the construction of any further high-rise or even
medium-rise buildings in areas previously earmarked by the council for tall
buildings such as the Docklands, Heuston and Connolly stations and George’s
Quay.

The Lap, which functions as a development plan specific to a particular
area, would have to specify maximum building heights allowed. Until a local
area plan was approved all developments would have to remain low rise.
Councillors last night agreed to define low rise as up to six storeys in
relation to residential buildings and seven storeys for office buildings or
a maximum height of less than 28m.

The development of Laps has been a fraught process within the council.
Attempts were made over several years to introduce a LAP for Ballsbridge
but the plan fell apart when agreement could not be reached on whether to
allow a “landmark” tall building.

The amendment to the draft development plan in relation to the development
of Laps was agreed last night as a compromise motion. Several councillors
had wanted caps on height, and some motions would have seen high rise
defined as under 30m.

However the agreed amendment, by effectively deferring any decision on
maximum heights, makes the city development plan worthless as a guide to
developers as to where applications for tall building would be considered.

The draft plan will be released for a further round of consultation before
being formally agreed by councillors later this year.

City manager John Tierney in his report to councillors on the plan had
warned putting restrictive caps on heights would have “severe repercussions
for the city’s competitiveness”.

I know, because I lived through it in the 1980s as a politician both in government and in opposition. It is one of the great personal and social traumas to lose a generation to emigration. But it’s happening again. The ESRI predicts up to 200,000 people will emigrate between now and 2015.
It is because I have seen and understood the misery of emigration that my number one focus, the issue that drives my approach to my new position, is jobs. Both finding ways to keep people in work and creating conditions where entrepreneurs can generate new jobs.
Driven by this, I have no confidence in this Government’s bank strategy. It is a narrow strategy of writing whatever cheques are necessary to bail out delinquent banks, and then opportunistically looking for the softest targets to cut the budget deficit each year. It is not a sufficiently ambitious or strategic formula for getting Ireland back to work. And it’s not just me saying that. The IMF is now forecasting continued low growth and 10 per cent plus unemployment to 2015.
Brian Cowen’s reckless tenure as finance minister, combined with the €25 billion cost of Fianna Fáil’s bank bailouts, has left Ireland with little room to manoeuvre. Truly, when it came to solving our bank crisis, the bankers pulled the wool over Minister Brian Lenihan’s eyes and left you and me, the taxpayer, to foot a monstrous bill. Nonetheless, we have to fix the public finances and that means making savings of €3 billion in 2011.
Based on international experience we do know how best to tackle this deficit problem. Countries that attempt to fix a fiscal crisis by raising tax rates and cutting public investment suffer longer, deeper recessions than those that cut day-to-day spending.
To date, 55 per cent of the deficit-cutting measures taken by Brian Lenihan have been tax increases or cuts in public investment. The public investment programme for 2010-14 has already been cut by 40 per cent compared to what was set out in the National Development Plan, and the marginal tax rate on
a single person with average earnings has effectively been increased to 51 per cent. In short, this was the wrong medicine and instead of making things better, the patient got worse.

But it is a formula the Government seems intent on repeating in 2011. Having failed to lay the groundwork for generating significant savings from public sector re-organisation, the Government now seems set on cutting,  borrowing mainly through further cuts in public investment and increases in
taxes on income. This would be the wrong approach because it would further damage confidence in our economic future and delay investment and job creation.
I am convinced that the key to tackling the deficit is to transform our public sector to deliver more with less. Successful public service transformations in other countries that have faced fiscal crises, like
Sweden and Canada, show us the way. In the mid-1990s a Canadian government shaved 20 per cent off government spending within four years to cut its budget deficit from 9.1 per cent of GDP to zero. In Sweden in the mid-1990s they cut 11 per cent from day-to-day spending with no ill-effects on
performance. Both countries achieved these savings while also enjoying strong economic recoveries.

The lessons in how to make spending savings are also clear. Salami slicing the budgets of all departments by roughly equal amounts , as our own Government is doing  is a lazy, ineffective and damaging way to make savings. The McCarthy report did however provide a menu of changes that
could be made but the Government have only tackled 10 per cent of the proposed measures.

What is required instead is a complete rethink of what services the State is providing and how it is providing them. You see, I believe that in Ireland we are lucky to have so many talented, dedicated and motivated public servants. A key challenge for any new government is to find a way to tap in to and harness that talent and energy.
To this end, Fine Gael has already published its FairCare plan to dismantle the HSE command and control system by moving to the proven Dutch ,managed competition model of healthcare. In that system competing health insurers provide affordable insurance to all and drive reform and innovation in the delivery of healthcare, particularly through the expansion of primary care. Where this approach has been brought in it does not cost extra and, in fact, significant savings can be made.
Likewise, Fine Gael’s NewERA policy sets out how we will streamline our semi-State sector in order to accelerate badly needed investments in the infrastructural arteries vital for our economic success , electricity, broadband and water.
More than that, we have set out the relatively costless changes in policy that we would implement , such as the elimination of the travel tax , that could support job creation in a whole range of sectors.

Our focus is on promoting a culture of entrepreneurship and risk-taking, in part by overhauling Victorian laws which still treat Irish entrepreneurs that fail as economic lepers rather than potential wealth and job-creators of the future.
We believe private enterprise, in particular the not-for-profit voluntary sector, should play a much greater role in the more cost-effective delivery of publicly-funded services. And, we have plans for a smaller, more skilled, more competitive banking and finance sector that would once again be the servant of productive enterprise , not the other way around.
History shows that the right decisions by government make a real difference. We have a proud, talented and determined people that are looking for new hope and optimism. We are not getting that from this
Government.

Putting jobs and people ahead of bankers and bailouts is central to an approach that I will bring to any opportunity I get to serve. Weeping parents in departure lounges in airports around the country must not become the iconic image of this recession. Unless we change direction quickly my fear is that it will.

Michael Noonan is Fine Gael spokesman on finance.