Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister and thank him for his time and presentation. I will talk about what I regard as one of the biggest challenges we face, that is, around achieving sustainable growth. We will not have long-term prosperity without it. Ireland's record is pretty dismal. Our emissions are 50% higher than the EU average. Our circularity rate, which measures the extent to which we harvest the materials we use to reuse them, is 2% in Ireland but 13% in the EU. Our waste avoidance and recovery rates in construction, food and many other sectors are one of the worst in Europe. Our renewable energy generation is good in many ways in electricity for a small grid at 40%. Nonetheless, it is 10% in the economy overall, versus 15% in Europe. We have a unique opportunity. I do not know if the Minister will agree with my view that underlying all these trends is the lack of a coherent strategy around circular economy thinking, that is, looking at the materials we use and the fossil fuels we depend on. We are one of the most dependent on imported fossil fuels in Europe. There has not been consistent and strategic thinking across the Government on this. Would the Minister agree that circularity needs to be adopted as a cross-Government strategy, in addition to climate? It emphasises many things the climate debate tends to ignore. For example, if I buy an sports utility vehicle, SUV, that is 35 tonnes of embedded carbon. It may have happened in Japan or Korea but it has the same global impact as if it was manufactured in Ireland. It brings attention to a much wider range of choices we make and how they can be made sustainable. We are missing a beat in this area by not making it much more central to our communication with citizens and to the strategies each sector develops. Food, construction and other sectors are stand-out cases where enormous opportunities are being missed because we have not attended to them. My first question is whether the Minister agrees with me and whether he will start to build some momentum for this because climate is the dominant debate - and so it should be - but circular thinking is key to long-term prosperity.

The progress the Minister commented on in employment is truly staggering. Some 800,000 more people are at work now than in 2011 when I started in that Department. It seems that the Minister's move now is to consolidate that rather than setting a new employment target. There is no new employment target in the enterprise strategy. We recognise that what we must do is to make the jobs and enterprises we have better. In that context, the gap in productivity between the domestic sector, which has grown 0.6% per annum, versus multinationals, which have ten times the growth in productivity, clearly points to problems. I would be interested to understand the decision to give the LEOs an additional role with companies with more than ten employees in manufacturing and internationally traded services. A concern was expressed here that Enterprise Ireland is a centre of real experience that can drive productivity growth. Will the LEOs have that scale? There are approximately 30 of them. I do not remember the number. Will they have the capability? Do we need to think differently about how we will drive productivity growth in these Irish companies that are so important to our long-term future?

We have a continuing problem with price levels which revolves around our remote location. We know it is a problem, certainly with electricity and so on. Is there an emerging strategy to try to identify issues? I know the Minister has a meeting with the retail forum. In banking we have a rising-interest-rates environment. Banks are taking higher margins. Their profits are huge. One bank saw its share value increase by 4% in one day. Do we need to get together the Central Bank, the Financial Services and Pensions Ombudsman and the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission to look at how well we are protecting consumers in the environment of significant disruption that is occurring?