Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Ireland's exit from the supervision and control of the troika is a good positive step on the road to recovery. It does not solve all our problems. It leaves us, like people after a prolonged period of struggle, building and constructing a better future for our people and communities so that the sacrifices that people have made, undertaken and had imposed on them result in a better Ireland for people, families and communities throughout the country.

When the Government took office our immediate priority was to stabilise the economy and tackle the devastation inflicted on every community by unemployment. One of Fianna Fáil's biggest failures in the bailout period, which is no surprise given the utter chaos into which the Administration had lurched, was failing to spell out a convincing vision for building employment. It was still pretending it could hold back the flood when it should have been building the rafts people would need to stay afloat. It completely missed the point that a viable economy must start with work, and for this to be true there must be sustainable strategies to boost employment and tackle unemployment.

When the Government took office we were effectively starting from scratch. We took an entirely new approach in the area of social protection and welfare by focusing on activation - that is, getting people back into work, education, training or work experience and ensuring jobseekers received not only income supports but employment supports when they went to a social welfare office. The first visit to the social welfare office is to be the first day on a journey back to work. The activation approach underpins our new Intreo offices, which are one-stop shops rolled out throughout the country where jobseekers can get income and employment supports in one place for the first time, aided and assisted by modern technology. Much like the efforts to rebuild the economy, this has been painstaking work that has required time to implement, but the results are being clearly seen in the reduction in the live register.

I remind Deputies that for every 10,000 people who come off the live register and return to employment, the corresponding reduction in the overall bill relating to social welfare spending is approximately €95 million. The Pathways to Work approach serves a dual and crucial purpose, namely, getting people back to work and assisting them in building a better future for themselves and their families and reducing the social welfare bill in a way that has a positive impact in the context of reducing the country's deficit. That is why it is so important to have really strong programmes in respect of young people. It is for this reason that, in the context of the recent budget, I have focused on ensuring that some of the money which was previously spent on young people who were simply parked on the live register will instead be spent on the really intense activation programmes we are developing in the context of the youth guarantee.

The challenge now is to ensure we continue this progress and see to it that the new economy we develop in the aftermath of the bailout will be people-centred, with full employment and a fair wage as central goals. We must not resort to the banker-led, trickle-down con job which served as economic strategy under the previous Administration and led Ireland to the brink of collapse. There are two dimensions to this, namely, the policies the Government pursues domestically and those implemented at international level. At domestic level, we are now saying goodbye to the bailout programme, regaining control over our financial affairs and returning to our position as a normal eurozone member state with normal market funding arrangements. Money markets will still dictate very definite limits to our capacity to borrow at manageable interest rates, while the new so-called two-pack and six-pack rules within the EU - as approved by the people in last year's referendum - will impose quite strict limits on future budgets. However, the Government will be charting the course.

There are those - some on the left and others on the right - who, when we first entered office, favoured our reneging on all of the international commitments into which the country had entered. Of course, many of those commitments were entered into by the previous Government. Those to whom I refer wanted us to default on our debts. The people in question are under an obligation to spell out what a default actually means. They should also indicate what would actually have happened if we had defaulted. Having listened to the contributions of a number of Deputies in my office, I am obliged to state that certain individuals do not seem to realise that people are understandably upset about and critical of austerity. Had we defaulted, however, we would have triggered a level of austerity which would be infinitely worse than anything the country has experienced. Many economic commentators have analysed this matter in detail. The argument to the effect "Ah go on, we could default", which is put forward by certain people is disingenuous. If we had defaulted, we would have been immediately obliged to reduce the budget deficit to zero. Can Deputies imagine what this would have done to critical areas such as social welfare, health and education? The approach we chose has led to our engaging in a painstaking process over three budgets in order to reform the position and to start bringing the budget into balance. There is a need for honesty from those individuals who claim that it would be okay to default.

As we say goodbye to the troika-----

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