SEANAD REPORT:UP TO €4 billion was being wasted right across the public services, a Government member said. Jim Walsh (FF) said a person working in the sector had told him that he reckoned the level of waste amounted to double "what I was saying".
A national public expenditure cost-efficiency agency should be established to tackle this particular area. If we could effect savings by preventing waste throughout all sectors of the public service, we would then have money to invest in areas that would prime the economy.
Mr Walsh, who was speaking on the Finance Bill, said there was a real need to exempt children from inheritance tax. John Hanafin (FF) said there might be an opportunity to attract some of the people in the UK who objected to the tax on people with significant wealth resident in that jurisdiction. "I am certain that there would be a very innovative and a 'thinking outside the box' approach by this Government in the future, and now that this opportunity has presented itself this year perhaps that is something that the Minister might bear in mind."
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It would be cheaper to get the gardaí to deport Ministers for the period commemorating St Patrick, Dominic Hannigan (Lab) said.
Mr Hannigan complained about the sums spent on the deportation of six people - "they were accompanied by 25 police officers, one for every limb, if you like" - but he noted that one Minister was said to have spent €19,000 on car hire. "You could buy a car for that price. This is clearly, once again, not value for money."
Eoghan Harris (Ind) said that he had noticed, due perhaps to "a touch of recession," that we had got to the stage where a kind of taxi driver culture was prevailing in relation to politics, whereby one would almost have to apologise for being in the profession. "We are what we are and we are worth our money . . . It is necessary work for the Irish people."