Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

We all know the international financial system is in chaos and that Ireland's economic woes are mounting — even Fianna Fáil is gradually conceding that. The Taoiseach and Minister for Finance surely must be refreshed, relaxed and ready to roll up their sleeves now that summer has been and gone. If they do not start to get real about our economy, there is a danger that the autumn Dáil session will be a bridge between the Government's summer slumber and a winter of discontent.

The number one difficulty facing the economy is rising unemployment. Young men losing jobs on building sites are particularly affected. As we are in the distinguished presence of two men who have become Ministers of State since the new Government was formed, I remind them that since then 46,000 people have lost their jobs. That is a record for the 140 days they have been in office. The Government must make unemployment public enemy number one.

All our reluctant Minister for Finance seems to be able to muster is whinge after whinge after whinge. There is not an ounce of sympathy there. In fact, whingeing has been the most notable feature of Deputy Brian Lenihan's tenure as Minister for Finance to date. He said, before the summer, that businesses and consumers should stop whingeing about rising fuel prices. This showed just how out of touch he is with ordinary people. More recently, the Minister for whinge had the gall to blame the public for the housing bubble; his rationale was that "you get what you voted for". Let us not forget the Minister's most recent whinge last week when he blamed Joe Duffy for undermining the Irish banks when it is their own lax lending which has them in a bind as well as the failure of the Government to raise the deposit guarantee scheme as I and the Labour Party have requested for well over a year. Perhaps the Minister for Finance realises that Government oversight of the banking sector has been dysfunctional and he wanted to divert the spotlight.

Finally, the Taoiseach and the Minister for Finance have been consistent in their whingeing about international factors; they refuse to face up to the fact that our economic downturn is largely home-grown and the fault of this Fianna Fáil Government. Whingeing, passing the buck and laying off blame will not get our economy back on the right track.

Bringing the budget forward was a cynical attempt at media manipulation. The Minister has bought a six-week window during which he can brief the press that at least the Government is doing something. His refusal to release either budget estimates or a pre-budget outlook is wrong. He and his officials, unless they are from the same school of arithmetic that the Minister for Education and Science, Deputy Batt O'Keeffe, patronises, has to know the estimates and the likely outlook for next year. If not, they do not deserve to be put in charge of beer mat economics, from which the Minister for Education and Science's estimates seem to come.

The Minister for Finance's refusal to release the pre-budget outlook is consistent with the stunt former Minister Charlie McCreevy pulled on decentralisation. It leaves the element of surprise for the Minister on budget day when he can pull rabbits out of hats and leave little ability to analyse what becomes a done deal. Decentralisation backfired not so much on the Government because it won Fianna Fáil votes, but massively on the public finances where it has cost us untold billions of euro over and above what a normal ordinary quality programme of negotiated decentralisation would have done.

We are in a serious economic situation and now is not the time for such theatrics. The Minister should put the economy ahead of his own vanity. He should release realistic estimates for 2009 spending in advance of the budget as happens every other year. In the information vacuum that appears to be developing, it is difficult to see how the best decisions can be made in the interests of families in Ireland.

With financial markets facing their deepest crisis since the great depression, there is a growing consensus that the deregulation agenda of the past two decades has done more harm than good and must be reversed. We do not need to ban financial innovation — we need to regulate it so that it does not put the financial system itself in jeopardy. Part of the answer to the current financial crisis is the innovative regulation of derivative financial products.

Just this week the European Parliament adopted a bipartisan resolution on financial service regulation. There is agreement across the European political spectrum that the time for re-regulation is now. In the face of this common sense consensus, European bankers are fighting a strong rearguard action, aided and abetted, unfortunately, by pliant Governments, including our own. We should not take regulation from bankers. It ought to be parliaments who decide what is in the best interest of investment, depositor, saver and lender. The banks prioritise their own profit. They say regulation undermines competitiveness. What they actually mean is that regulation undermines their ability to make mega-profits by taking on mega-risks with other peoples' money. We need sensible regulation to restore financial stability.

Just as we have safety standards governing the food we eat, the cars we drive and the medicines we take, we need safety standards for financial products to protect the stability of the financial system. International financial regulators must be empowered to ensure that financial innovation never again gets so out of hand that it threatens the entire economy. We have not yet seen the impact on European banks of the results of what has happened in America because we do not know how much of the derivative products, much of which are financial rubbish, is in their balance sheets.

On the international scene we need a redesign of the financial regulatory architecture to ensure that any newly devised or existing financial products pass a consumer health check. Banking executives' bonus schemes should not incentivise excessive risk-taking, the masters of the universe, whether down in the IFSC, Wall Street or in the City of London. Bonuses and annual payments of €4 million, €10 million or €40 million are paid to them to gamble excessively with other people's money. We need an early warning system to ward off asset bubbles and an alignment of interests between mortgage lenders and mortgage investors.

The crisis of delinquent capitalism has already claimed high profile victims on Wall Street. The worry is that the financial crisis will spill over to claim its victims on the high street and main street of every Irish town and village. People up and down the country are facing real problems in the real economy and they need a Government that is the real deal.

Economic growth in Ireland is at its lowest level since 1988, unemployment has topped 6% and over 2,000 people are losing their jobs every week. The cost of living is increasing at 4.3% and is three times the rate the Government inherited in 1997. Consumer confidence is weakening and retail sales are falling for the first time since 2004. The CSO construction employment index is down by 16% in the past 12 months. Entrepreneurs with solid business plans cannot access finance and the Government has allowed for a deficit the public finances. I notice the Minister's careful words where he acknowledges a deficit of €5 billion, but we could be heading for €7 billion by the end of 2008.

The Labour Party rejects the conservative consensus that the public finances are the root cause of the problems in the economy, rather than a symptom of them. International factors are making a recovery more difficult, but the root of our problems is the home-grown housing bubble. There the Taoiseach led the field. He stoked this in the budget of 2006-07 in order to win the election. In the budget last year when Fianna Fáil was back in power, he stoked it again in order to win his party's leadership.

This is Deputy Brian Cowen's recession. When we come to write the history of the financial times of this period in Ireland I hope historians will describe it in those terms.

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