Michael D Higgins (Galway West, Labour)

I welcome the opportunity of saying a few words. It is very easy to speak against the Government amendment to the motion. The motion has some very good proposals, but there are some points with which I disagree.

This is a sad day for my constituency because we have just lost 500 jobs, so competitiveness is not an abstract discussion. I find it extraordinary that the larger parties in this House failed to discuss the price we have paid for a speculative version of the economy. There is nothing vague about this. In the Minister's speech last night, we heard about the contribution the mortgage payment makes to inflation. How does this come about? Between 1995 and 2000, our growth rate was sustained by an export performance. Between 2000 and 2005, exports often went in the wrong direction and our growth rate was sustained by a revaluation of the property base of the economy. The unchecked speculative tendencies, supported by the large parties of this House, have gone like a dose of salts through the economy, making it impossible for two people on modest incomes to afford even a first home. We must look at where real productivity is taking place in the economy. There are 250,000 small and medium enterprises hiring 800,000 people. In serious economics, we need to be able to look at the productive base of the economy. We also need to be able to look at the genuine factors that are affecting competitiveness.

We have an opportunity this afternoon regarding the hidden agreements made by the semi-State bodies to sell their assets. For example, CIE offered to sell some of its property to release money for the capital programme in the national development plan, disgracefully abandoning responsibility to public transport.

The Ministers of State here today are people for whom I have respect and I listened with great care to the Minister last night. There is a need for an integration of life-long learning, to which the Minister referred in his speech. It is ridiculous that all the different Departments and agencies place difficulties in the way of a worker who wants to go back to his or her education. There are huge impediments to getting off social welfare and going back to education, or going from a low-paid, low-skilled job into further education.

John Maynard Keynes once said that one should begin to worry about the economy if the ratio of difference in incomes between the people at the top and the bottom increased by more than 50 to one. What about when it is 5,000 to one? Will anybody speak about the immorality of non-executive directors of banks and other companies rewarding themselves with outrageous salaries, which they then deliver into ostentatious expenditure? The only people who salivate at their performance are those who write in the Sunday Independent. Do not ask the hundreds of thousands of low-paid civil servants, many of whom are drawing family income supplement, to watch on while these slobber at the trough and the media admires them.

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