Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

I wish to confirm that the budget day forecasts, both economic and fiscal, have not been changed. The Tánaiste at budget time noted the internal and external risks to economic forecasts. Some of those identified risks are now emerging. I do not think the House can ignore the fact of what is happening internationally. We must at least look at what has happened in the stock markets since the beginning of the year and what is continuing to happen in the sub-prime rate, in the credit crunch and what has happened in the US economy and the movements in sterling. Nevertheless, our economy has remained extremely strong in the services sector, the agricultural sector, manufacturing exports and financial services. We have been closely examining our figures every week, particularly the full monthly figures. These show where most of the slowdown is occurring. I do not need to go through the figures. If the figures for house construction show 80,000, 78,000, 82,000 and 88,000 houses were being built for a few consecutive years and then there is a reduction to 50,000 houses and every 10,000 of those are providing a growth rate of 1% and probably somewhere in the order of taxes to the amount of €0.5 billion, one can clearly see the figure. While there has been unemployment in the construction sector in 2007, it should be noted that the rate of redundancies was very small at only 15%, 4,000 redundancies, out of the total for the year.

As I said previously, the Government's response as on budget day will continue to be as in other countries — the input of a large fiscal impetus into the economy under the national development plan. Rather than increasing the capital programme for this year we have given an injection of an enormous amount of resources into the national development plan which will drive both construction and services and development in infrastructural projects throughout the State. If this were not in place, if the Government had not opted to take that position, both the employment and taxes positions would be far worse this year.

Without going through all the economic forecasts, when one studies the economic forecasts from the various stockbroker houses and others, they all indicate that all of the underlying measures are strong and that all of the policies which we are pursuing should not be altered and changed. The Government is not going to alter them. This year was always going to be a difficult year. It will require close management. I am not in any way denying that the revenues in the areas I have specified are down and we must manage this with care during the year 2008.

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