Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I will make a number of points. First, there is a big focus on construction because of the 250,000 private sector jobs this economy lost in the three years up to 2011, a big chunk were in the construction sector. We have many long-term unemployed people who came from the construction sector. If we can get some of those back to work it would be welcome but we are not going to build things for the sake of building things. We are building things that were strategically important in the plan for building an appropriate infrastructure for Ireland into the future. We need to meet the demographic pressures on schools, which is huge. That is welcome, but we need to build the schools now to ensure that the children who are aged one and two now will have schools to attend in two or three years' time.

Second, in terms of our health strategy to refocus the provision and delivery of health services away from the acute sector into the primary health sector, we need to build those primary care centres to do that, and hopefully save money, and have a more modern model of health delivery. Obviously, we need to have an infrastructure that is complete because although most of the main highways were built, not all of the motorways were built. For example, the N17 and N18 in the west is an important linkage across the west coast that needs to be advanced.

Those traditional construction projects are important strategically but we need to go beyond those, and I have an open mind to look at investment in other areas. The Deputy mentioned the energy sector. I had a meeting this morning with the vice president of the European Investment Bank, Jonathan Taylor, who has been here a few times. We have very good relations with the European Investment Bank now. Its president, Werner Hoyer, has been here on a few occasions also, and I have met him here and in Brussels. It wants to spell out the programmes it is funding. For example, the acronym JESSICA is for a city investment programme. It invests in retrofitting of houses and insulation of local authority houses, and it has programmes across Europe. One that I recommend the Deputy might examine is the Green London programme that it is funding, which funds the refurbishment of social housing in London. I would like to see a green Dublin programme, and perhaps a green Limerick or a green Waterford programme as well. That is in the JESSICA area. The European Investment Bank also has a JEREMIE programme. That is providing funding to the small and medium enterprises sector, which is also important.

What I am saying is that we hope to leverage up the money we will get from State assets. In terms of the idea that we have allocated €6.4 billion from the National Pensions Reserve Fund into a new strategic investment, we have a very significant quantity of money into the future to invest in job creating enterprises - private sector enterprises, public sector enterprises and infrastructure deficits. We are priming ourselves to grow ourselves out of the hole into which our economy has sunk.