A Cheann Comhairle, I welcome the opportunity to come into this House to defend this Government’s record against this ill-founded and nonsense motion.
This motion from Sinn Fein represents nothing more than a politically opportunistic act from a party with nothing to offer to the national debate except easy options and damaging policies.
The Sinn Fein pre-budget submission was a con job designed to avoid answering the most basic of questions about how Sinn Fein would manage the economy.
They admit their wealth tax was uncosted by the Department of Finance and incredibly claim it would raise a magic €800 million.
The truth is that their policies would tax the country back into recession.
Furthermore this Government will not accept lectures from a hypocritical party who go about implementing tax increases and spending cuts north of the border while opposing every such similar policy down here.
The truth is this Government has been hard at work cleaning up the economic havoc left by the former Fianna Fail administration who left the country with:
A humiliating IMF bailout programme;
Massive bank debts saddled on the taxpayer;
Record numbers of Irish people unemployed;
And the highest deficit in Europe.
And now the current leader of that party, who sat in Cabinet throughout all those ruinous years, chooses to come into this House to criticise our record in Government!
A Cheann Comhairle, March 9th 2011 marked a fresh start for the country.
The 12 months previous to this day were rocked by instability and crisis of leadership while the country continued to sleepwalk deeper into crisis.
Fast forward to today and the country, while still in a very challenging position, is on a solid path to recovery.
We have a made a start in tackling the country’s problems and in getting Ireland working again.
Our first priority in Government was to restore economic, financial and political stability, and to re-build the international reputation of the country.
Central to this was the commitment to deliver on our promise to engage constructively with the Troika to reengineer aspects of the bail out programme to give Ireland the best chance of emerging from the programme in 2013.
Despite the constant wave of negativity from some of the parties opposite who said it couldn’t be done and that the Government was failing to secure agreement, we delivered on our promises.
We secured agreement on reducing Ireland’s programme loan interest rates and extending loan maturities which cut the cost of the IMF-EU bail-out loans by over €9 billion.
We secured agreement on the restoration of the minimum wage.
We secured agreement on keeping a large portion of the proceeds from the sale of State assets; and
We have secured agreement in principle to break the link between bank debt from the sovereign.
I recognise that the burden on Irish taxpayers is still onerous. I will travel to Brussels tomorrow to continue these discussions on the framework for a single European bank regulator. Separately, Irish officials continue to work with the European institutions on a solution to the promissory note issue.
I’m hopeful for progress in the coming weeks and months as we continue to work to make Ireland’s recovery stronger and more sustainable.
The focus of the Government is, and has to be, providing more jobs for our people.
I do not accept that we have to be saddled indefinitely with:
current high rates of unemployment,
slow growth and
a squeeze on disposable incomes.
These are neither inevitable nor tolerable.
Our ambition is to move beyond the progress achieved to date, and to tackle these key issues head on.
For this reason we have deliberately focussed on job creation, and are committed to ensuring that our policies support strong and sustainable employment growth.
We are committed to adding 100,000 jobs to the economy by 2016 and to have 2 million people in employment by 2020.
To achieve this I want Ireland to be recognised as the best small country in the world to do business by 2016.
In the first 100 days of office we introduced our Jobs Initiative with a range of tax and policy supports to help job intensive industries such as the tourism and hospitality sector. Employment in these sectors has grown over the past year.
The last 2012 Budget had a real focus on encouraging our FDI sector to expand further in Ireland and to help Irish companies to expand further abroad.
Throughout the course of the year we have had a series of major investment and jobs announcements from both indigenous and foreign companies, including Kerry Group, Paypal, Apple, Mylan, Voxpro, Paddy Power, EA Games and Arvato Finance.
Last year saw exports reach new heights with a record €173billion, 10% higher than in 2007, the highest pre-crisis figure. A good export performance is expected again this year. Nobody can deny the importance of that.
Earlier this year we launched a comprehensive and detailed Action Plan on Jobs.
The action plan is about taking incremental and necessary action right across Government to support enterprises to grow, and to create and retain jobs.
In tandem with our Action Plan we launched Pathways to Work – which represents a complete restructuring and fundamental reform of our welfare services and in the way we support jobseekers.
We have looked to maximise private investment in much needed infrastructure.
Last year we announced the establishment of NewERA and a Strategic Investment Fund.
To improve the availability of credit for business the Credit Guarantee Scheme commenced in October of this year.
Initially, the scheme will facilitate up to €150m of additional lending per annum to SMEs, in addition to the lending targets set for the pillar banks.
A Microfinance Scheme also opened for business in October. This will provide loans on a commercial basis for start-up businesses and micro-enterprises.
While unemployment is still unacceptably high and its effects felt far too wide, the most recent quarterly figures show that the employment situation has stabilised.
The pro-job measures in last week’s Budget were aimed to build on these tentative steps to encourage greater job creation and investment.
Over the past year 20,000 new private sector jobs have been created following the loss of 250,000 jobs in the private sector during the previous three years.
The package of measures in this Budget aimed at the small business sector will encourage businesses throughout the country to start expanding and hiring again. They will restore a much needed measure of confidence to the job creation sector.
This Budget is a building block in the transition from the old failed economic plan based on property speculation and debt to a new competitive Irish economy based on enterprise, exports and innovation. That competitiveness is absolutely crucial for continued investment so that jobs can be created.
A Cheann Comhairle… fixing our national finances and putting them back on a sound footing is a prerequisite for job creation and economic growth. It’s absolutely necessary for confidence and certainty in our economy.
The Government makes no apology for the vital need to reduce our national deficit to more sustainable levels. To this end the Government remains fully committed to the 2013 deficit ceiling of 7.5% of GDP and to reducing our deficit to below 3% of GDP by 2015.
This is not an easy budget for the people of Ireland nor could it have been... but it is a necessary step as part of our long term plan for economic renewal.
This Budget is about supporting jobs, and about ensuring that the burden of the adjustment is fair.
To fulfil our potential as an economy and as a country we have to restore our public finances to a healthy condition. That’s our real challenge as a country.
This Government inherited a country in a bailout programme, shut off from the international funding markets, and reliant on funding support from our international partners.
Today we are in a position where we have begun to borrow off the international markets again, the interest rate on Irish 10 year bonds is down to 4.6% compared to a rate of over 15% last year.
Our banks and utilities are able to access the markets once again for funding for investment.
We remain on course to successfully exit the bailout programme in 2013.
The sacrifices and the cooperation of the Irish people have gotten us to this position where we can now look to the future with confidence once again. Where the changes introduced over the past two years can begin to earn real results in job creation and investment.
There is no gain in the easy and hypocritical politics offered by the parties opposite.
Fianna Fail, a party which implemented across the board cuts to basic core welfare rates for carers and the blind, who sign up for a property tax when in Government, only to turn around now in an opportunistic campaign of opposition, It is clear that Fianna Fail continues to only care about Fainna Fail.
Sinn Fein, a party with uncosted economic plans that would tax the country back into recession while trying to reconcile its severe split personality problem as they continue to implement cuts and increased property taxes north of the border.
A Cheann Comhairle… notwithstanding these facts the Government stands on its own record.
Every day I speak to people who share their experiences of hardship, whether by losing a job or impacted by changes to valued public services.
It is for them that my Government is committed to making sure that we do everything in our power to restore this country’s economic prosperity.
We must not forget the many strengths of this nation.
We have faced a very serious and destabilising economic crash, unprecedented in its scale.
We have done what has been necessary to do.
But I see a bright future for this country of ours.
I acknowledge that some communities may not yet have seen visible signs of recovery.
We are on a difficult journey, but we are travelling with a sense of purpose and with a clear goal.
We have set the country on the path to recovery.
We will get Ireland working again.