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

I am sorry for coming late to the meeting. I was in three or four different places at the same time. I have been listening to the debate and there is a certain amount of déjà vu. Around the time of the financial crash, there was much doomsday speculation that we had limited opportunities, we were going to go down and would be down for years and decades, potentially 50 or 60 years, and that we would have a second bailout. All the economic speculators told us what was going to happen. They were all wrong. I bring to people's attention that one can go from relative ease in the economy to a disaster in a very short time if one makes the wrong moves. When we are getting all this advice about what to do, let us think back to the UK, which has a bigger economy than ours. Certain moves were made and the result was disastrous. The effects will continue for a long time. While I encourage new information and new thinking, I think about Venezuela with its many mineral resources and a huge economy, which is not there anymore. It is gone.

If we want to scare people and set the €600 million or €800 million against the total benefit on a speculative basis and hope that it will not scare investors away, my advice to the witnesses is to keep it quiet. We are in a challenging place with the economic climate in the globe. Those challenges will not go away and they will be around for a considerable time. My advice is to be careful that we do not cause, say or do anything that might bring about a rethink. Do not forget that we are also in a situation where many tech companies are changing the rules. They are reducing their workforces worldwide. We should have regard for what is happening in a serious way and try to make sure that we do what is right for the country, not just what theoretically could be right.

I again apologise to all the economists I apologised to previously. After the financial crash, they all came forward with doomsday solutions and predictions of worse to come, but that is not what won the day. What won the day was hard thinking, shrewd decisions, investment in the right place at the right time, not going with the flow or with populism, but doing what needed to be done to retain jobs and to reverse the flow of decades. Let us remember where we came from. We once exported our population to cities and countries all over the world in the hope that they could get a job. Almost every family in this country has a history of various family members going abroad, not because they wanted to go abroad but because they had to. That has been reversed. It took much effort and we should not throw it away.

My last point is about the wealth tax. I hate when people jump up and down to say how wonderful the wealth tax would be and how much more money we would make from it. We had a wealth tax in this country and it was abolished because it was not doing the job it was expected to do. It was doing the reverse. I would ask how much wealth we have and what it is based on. It is based on salaries and property. We spend much of our time talking about the wealthiest people in the country who happen to be living here, for whatever reason, and how much more money we can take from them. Do we really think that they want to let us do that to them? I do not think so. In the marketing world, one always has to have regard to the ambient conditions. Those conditions tell a different tale.