Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael)
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I think I am. I have to check sometimes. I welcome the guests and contributors to the debate. I will comment on a couple of things. I am reminded of Harold Wilson's Government in the early 1960s when a problem arose. Every company that was losing money, it was decided to nationalise it. They ended up nationalising a bunch of losers and they had to denationalise them at a later stage. That comes about when the state gets involved in running everyone's domestic business and we are in danger of doing that now. It is a very bad thing to do. It has contributed to inflation. When something is put in place, the public expects it to work on the basis that it is primarily to help them.

Many across Europe have their eyes on the taxation of multinationals and it is not necessarily for our good. As far as we are concerned, I strongly believe that we do need to be less dependent on them. That does not mean that we should encourage them out of the country. That means that we should use the taxation that accrues from them to ensure that we have something saved for the future or that we find other ways of doing it. I do not see their existence as a problem at all. It is only when we become dependent entirely on the taxation levels coming from there. We have to get around to putting something aside. I have heard politicians in this House and people outside saying over the last year that there should be nothing for the rainy day fund and that it is a waste of money; that it is raining now and let us spend it now. That is what happened before the economic crash. That is precisely what happened. Everyone said "we have the money now; let's spend it". There is certain expenditure that needs to take place with infrastructure and so on, capital expenditure, but in the event of our getting to the situation where we are funding the domestic economy in terms of the weekly shopping bills etc., that is not going to work. It has never worked anywhere. We can complain about it any way we like.

I am tired of the continuous barrage of criticism of the state of the country and the budget. There is very little recognition of where we came from. Where we came from, not many years ago was an bord snip. Is there anyone around who remembers an bord snip or an bord snip nua, when Colm McCarthy set about identifying the serious cuts that needed to be enacted as a matter of urgency? That is only a little over ten years ago. When that came, it was severe. The options were simple. We could take those cuts in general for a certain length of time or accept them permanently for a longer time. Those were the two options available to us. We have forgotten about that and we need to think of it very carefully again. We need to use the resources available now to us to protect ourselves in the event of a weakness and a real rainy day coming over the horizon. And it could. Remember that Covid came since then. After the economic crash we had Covid and all the attendant difficulties that have come with the energy crisis, the war in Ukraine and so on. There are many things now that we need to be careful about. We need to provide for their impact in one way or another and we need to use the multinational corporations to do it. They are very welcome here and long may they stay. I have been at meetings in Brussels and elsewhere across Europe where they could barely conceal the need to encourage them elsewhere. There are many personalities that I could name - I do not want to but I have done so before many times - who are interested in ensuring that they do not remain here. Let us be serious. I have two or so of them in my constituency. Let us recognise the importance of having them here in providing employment, tax revenue and exports, as well as market demands generating local demand and so on. These are hugely important.

It reminds me of the 1980s, which seems very distant now, when, on a parliamentary visit to Stuttgart, we visited Mercedes which then employed 22,000 people. We had nothing in this country at the time. I remember asking if we could market Ireland abroad and to give us the information and we would use it. There was nothing. It was done on different basis, which was regional and so on. Anyway, there were 22,000 people working there at that time. The company was upgrading and rationalising and there were people who were supposed to be let go. Automation had come about and so on. What they did was they retrained the people they were going to lose and used robots and every other means of re-employing them and doubling their output. I am saying this simply because of this continuous harangue about how bad things are. I know how bad things are and I have been dealing with people all that time. They are bad but they are not nearly as bad as they could have been, had we had no money to pay the bills in the most recent crisis. And there will be more crises -----