Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome our four visitors. There is the technical exercise which has been operating. There is room for some debates around the numbers but there is broad agreement on them. Looking into them, so much of the growth has happened due to something that is completely outside our control, namely, Mr. Draghi's policy of devaluing the currency. We have been a major beneficiary of that because so much of our trade is outside the eurozone. That is a hard one to predict and it might even reverse. Mr. McCarthy mentioned the accommodative monetary policy. It is just quantitative easing on steroids and that may not last either. In respect of the domestic signs, I hear from my colleagues, who come from the country and visitors, that we will not have tourism growth because hotel prices have doubled in Dublin. We are supposed to be very much into tourism but people tell me that what they got for €40 in the past is now €80.

We need to stop screw ups, a bucket load of which were referred to by the Comptroller and Auditor General. Turning public sector inputs into outputs remains a problem. Everybody on the Joint Committee on Communications, Energy and Natural Resources thought the Eircode system was nuts. People came in and said that they would not use it. I have not yet received a letter that used it but €38 million has been spent on it. The Comptroller and Auditor General is most caustic. The benefits were all over the place. The Revenue Commissioners opted out, as there were no benefits to it. An Post and the private sector opted out also. This is a project somebody within the permanent government just kept pursuing. We have gone ahead with it and it is as useless as people predicted it would be. We cannot keep doing that. The article by Colm McCarthy in The Sunday Independentabout the metro to the airport argued that it would be slower than the bus from Busáras, the bus from Lucan and the bus from Sandymount. Why is this the case? It is because we already have a tunnel to the airport. It does not conform to the Government's own guidelines. Maybe we can say that this was just something we throw out because there was an election coming up but having published it, we will put it through the mill. However, there was no evidence that the Irish Government's economic evaluation service had any input into what was announced.

The ESRI thinks that house prices are six times average incomes. They are still high by international standards. From watching the Irish economy, Mr. McCarthy knows that there are so many people who regard high house prices are economic growth. At six times average incomes, they are high by European standards. We tried it at 12 times average incomes and wrecked the place. I do not see that Irish banking has been reformed. The auditors will move to the Irish Auditing and Accounting Supervisory Authority in June 2016, about eight years after they produced audited reports on Irish banks that were completely useless and cost us €64 billion.

I see an awful lot of things that are wrong. That nice data is a good exercise in itself but perhaps economics should be more about resource allocation and less about doing twiddly little bits of forecasts and so on because that is the kernel of economics as far as I am concerned and that is where I saw Rip Van Winkle. There is a load of people in Ireland who would be quite happy to wake up and pretend it is 2007 again. They include builders with massively high costs, which is why we are unable to house people. The houses the Minister brought in for €65,000 seem to be okay but there is nothing less than €250,000 elsewhere. What does Deputy Boyd Barrett think of it? He would not go for it.