They're selling the family silver back to the people who owned it in the first place

Last week I half expected to encounter Minister Mary O'Rourke in Moore Street with a wheelbarrow flogging Telecom shares. The lady's enthusiasm for the sale of the century is infectious. Whatever about patriotism, this is an act of unrivalled populism. Selling off to the people at a bargain price bits of a company that the people already own so that they can get a quick premium of a few hundred quid beats free toothbrushes any day.

I am pretty confident that the redoubtable Public Enterprise Minister will have a pitch alongside the bookies at the Galway races lining up the rest of the State sector. Aer Rianta, Aer Lingus, ESB, Bord Gais, ACC, ICC and so on. Even the TSB, not an orthodox State enterprise, will be chalked up on the Minister's blackboard. Five to four the field.

The effort put into making a success of the biggest privatisation in the history of the State is admirable. If the same effort had been put into making a success of the Luas project, Dubliners would be well on the way to an improved public transport system.

When the deal is done and the bills are paid, the taxpayer will have very little change out of £50 million. That's the anticipated cost of the flotation.

These guys don't come cheaply, and its hardly a surprise that they are salivating at the prospect of other public enterprises coming to the market. In such an environment, where the professionals are cleaning up, it is only prudent to transfer a miserly few bob to the citizenry. Otherwise, they might rise up against their company being sold off or, at a minimum, take a dim view of the wealth being conferred on an army of advisers, accountants, lawyers and PR gurus.

Meanwhile, up and down the country little old ladies exchange their Post Office savings books for share certificates. Down in Killarney, the talk among the cream of our trade union movement will be about the issue price, the anticipated premium and the right time to sell. And it's all down to Lady Bountiful. In short, we have never had it so good.

Make no mistake about it. If the Telecom IPO is successful it will provide the political impetus for a clearout of the family silver. Soon we will be left only with Farmleigh House.

The indiscriminate sale of our public enterprises is in accord with an economic masterplan, isn't it? After a process of intense internal debate the Government has embarked, for considered strategic and economic reasons, on a planned programme of privatisation?

Like hell it has. There was no internal debate. There has been no public debate. There is no political debate. This is expediency writ large. We are making it up as we go along. At best, the Government is capturing a mood. Fashion, and not economic planning, is dictating the privatisation agenda. It is suddenly fashionable to have a punt. Surely, after all the wall-to-wall advertising, the Government wouldn't be pushing it if it weren't a sure thing?

Until recently, and I mean as recently as the last general election, Fianna Fail claimed to be more protective of the State sector than the Labour Party. Now, it seems it is in favour of indiscriminate wholesale privatisation. And this from a Government stretched to know what productively to do with a projected budget surplus of around £1.7 billion.

If developments in the international communications industry make strategic partnership essential, and even privatisation desirable, does it follow that identical considerations apply to other State or semi-state companies? Is there not an imperative to take each company on its merits?

Is the Telecom experience relevant to any decision to be made, for example, on Great Southern Hotels? What is the experience in other countries of privatising energy supply? Or water supply? Who exactly benefits from the headlong rush to privatisation? Are we really building a shareholders' democracy? How does Ireland Inc come out of all this?

Liberalisation of the telecoms industry within a proper public regulatory framework will, I believe, provide the conditions for enhanced wealth creation in Ireland. Ms O'Rourke has acted with commendable speed in announcing this week the international broadband link to the National Digital Park at Citywest. This opens up significant potential for Ireland in the electronic commerce area.

However, it doesn't similarly follow that selling off a valuable piece of our tourism infrastructure, i.e., the Great Southern Hotels, is in the public interest. To argue that the State has no role in "making beds" is no more than an ideological soundbite. I recall the determined efforts made in the 1980s to dispose of these hotels for a song. Prior to the 1980s some of them were indeed sold off for buttons.

There is a privatised energy service in Northern Ireland called Northern Ireland Electricity or, latterly, Viridian. The cost of electricity to domestic customers is 24 per cent higher in Northern Ireland than in the Republic. The difference for industrial customers is 18 per cent as between North and South.

Yet an amendment tabled by the Minister for Public Enterprise to the recent ESB Bill, whose paternity is being denied by her Department, would have, inter alia, diminished the worth of the ESB if ultimately it comes to the market. Public debate on that occasion caused the Minister to withdraw the amendment.

Now that the onerous task of selling us something we already own has been lifted from her shoulders, Ms O'Rourke will turn her attention to a proposed fare hike for the investment-starved Dublin Bus. The people in the main who will pay the hike are the very people who didn't have the ready cash to benefit from the Telecom sop to the chattering classes.

Tom Waits once had a line in a song that "the large print giveth and the small print taketh away". It sums up the differing attitudes to privatisation and public investment that this Government operates. Never has this difference been demonstrated more starkly than in the current developments regarding Telecom Eireann and Dublin Bus.

Pat Rabbitte TD is Labour spokesman on Enterprise, Trade and Employment.