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

I thank the Senator. I also thank our witnesses for their very informative replies to the questions and to our members also for raising the questions in the first place.

I will comment on two or three of the issues raised. Short- or long-term dependency on the taxes from corporation profits is an issue that has to be measured carefully but I do not believe that we should necessarily advertise the fact that we know it is going to come to an end. That can well encourage people in the wider European community to take advantage of that, which I will explain in a second.

The benefit of the rule has been gone into in detail with regard to both the new and old rules. The old rules were okay but they were not allowed to work when they should have worked. I was one of the people who was invited - for what reason I do not know - to a meeting in Brussels in 2008 where we were effectively told that we were broke and that we were major contributors to that wreckage. I believe this meeting was chaired by Viscount Davignon and a number of people were there, including very prominent UK contributors who had a great number of things to say to us. It was a very lonely place to be. We were isolated and spoken about as if we were not there at all with the "does he take sugar in this tea?" or whatever syndrome. It was a sad place to be because we, unfortunately, had overspent, as had a number of other countries at the same time, and we are not in a position to recover overnight to the same extent that other countries were because they had greater resources.

Incidentally, in respect to Norway, which is not a member of the EU, it has significant oil and gas resources on its shoreline. While it might have managed these resources fairly well, it is also subject to the worldwide rules with respect to climate change, I hope. Otherwise, we may find ourselves contributing to climate change disproportionately in an area we cannot afford and we may find ourselves in Brussels again listening to the same argument. I certainly would be anxious that that would not happen, but we have to, nonetheless, meet climate change challenges.

My next point is the one about austerity measures. Austerity is something governments can avail of from time to time to check growth, effective over-expenditure, and so on and so forth. That option was not available then. There was no option. The options we were given at that meeting were to face the reality and to accept and operate the cuts to the extent of one third of the pensions and salaries, and of everything, or to have these cuts imposed by up to two thirds, in which case there would have been devastation. This was not an issue of choice but one of absolute necessity and survival. We then had to have the areas such as agriculture and the agrifood industry to help us recover. If we damage that sector to any great extent in trying to achieve climate changes, we will have a difficulty there also. Let us know what we need to know about these things beforehand.

My final point is on how we handle the extra taxes from corporation profits. I believe one thing is essential which is our willingness and readiness to spend, as it is easy to do that and there are very many good reasons on which we can spend that money at any time, but one thing, however, is certain. If the ratio of spending to the total size of the national debt and indebtedness, which controls our ability to borrow, is not kept in some kind of tandem with each other, at some time in the future there is no doubt we will find ourselves in another difficult situation that we may not be able to control to the same extent as we did on the previous occasion. That is because we have a much bigger population now, much bigger responsibilities, and there is always the possibility of another war taking place.

All I can say is that the famous meeting in that oval room in Brussels, where the Commission meets, was a sad place to be at the time. We did not have many friends. In the middle of all of that, some of our European friends were not all that helpful. They were very quick to blame this country for the woes of everybody else. It was easy to do that, of course, but we survived, if only just. Again, I thank our guests for being with us today. We will suspend for a few minutes before we begin our second session of the day.