Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I apologise for having been absent but I am interested in the debate. A few points come to my mind. On the last subject raised, people are going to, and will wish to, work for longer. They will need to do so because they are living longer. The natural corollary is that they will continue to work. It would be difficult to sell to the people who are the voters - the voters count - the notion that we are all going to retire at 55 years and be looked after for the rest of our lives. It is not going to be that way, nor should it be. It will involve the other route.

We always look over our shoulder to make sure we are not going in the direction of the financial crash ever again. When it occurred, the then Government and Oireachtas Members were given advice of every kind known. We were told to default and that nobody could do anything about it. We were told we owed too much money and that, as a consequence, we should default. Well-meaning economists told us this. Others told us that there would be a second bailout equal to, or nearly equal to, the first. Fortunately, we did not take account of that either and decided not to proceed in that way. By "we", I mean the Government and Oireachtas. A lot of pressure was exerted when the IMF took over Government Buildings. It was deciding what was going to happen. We had a choice. One option was to default, in which case we would be swinging in the wind with no support from any quarter, no banking and no credit, credibility or credit rating. We should remember all the worries about the credit rating going from bad to worse, or downhill all the time, with obvious consequences for the future. However, we recovered fairly quickly. We did so for a number of reasons. A couple of the basic industries, such agrifood and pharmaceutical, doubled up very quickly and carried the responsibility of driving the economy forward through exports.

It will be different in the future. I fell foul of many economists during the period in question. Before the crash came at all, I raised on several occasions in the House questions that needed to be answered at the time. I mentioned this previously. I had one answer to one question before the whole thing closed down. The answer was an honest answer, given by the then Minister for Finance, a constituency colleague. He told it as it was. Action needed to be taken then but none was. The question and its implications were pushed aside.

At this stage, I feel we need to have people with good judgment who do not panic and plan based on what is happening and might happen in the best- and worst-case scenarios. Our economy has grown as our population has grown. In the past 30 or 40 years, our population has almost doubled. We had underdeveloped country before our membership of the EU. We went well ahead from the time we became a member state, and we have lots of pace ahead of us still and many jobs for people born here and those who want to come to live here, because that is how our economy is going to grow. At this stage, we must be astute. We need to do the things that work well in achieving fiscal value. We need to invest heavily in infrastructure because we did not have it in the past. The Industrial Revolution did not come to us until after we joined the EU.

Those are the points that come to my mind based on my simple observations. They need to be borne in mind for the future. I am not an expert but have met many experts in my time here.