Joe Costello (Dublin Central, Labour)

I thank Deputy Penrose for sharing time. I compliment Deputy English and his party on tabling this valuable Private Members' motion. I agree with Deputy Penrose's final point on the need for the Government to invest considerably more funding in local authorities so that much needed local authority work can be done.

The Minister of State will be aware of today's announcement that the number of families looking for social and affordable housing under local authorities' remit has increased from 43,000 to 56,000. The irony is that at a time when the economy was booming, particularly the construction industry, which constructed far too many private houses, far too few public housing projects were completed. In my constituency almost €2 billion worth of regeneration projects that were to have been built through public private partnerships have gone down the tubes. There is no investment and we are desperately trying to get local authority or Government funding to fill the gap.

I attended a meeting last night with residents of O'Devaney Gardens to try to reassure them that they would not be left in the lurch. It has already taken ten years to try to get the various administrations to inject the funding and get the development to proceed. We are no closer to it than we were when the entire process started. Tonight I have heard that another public private partnership in my constituency, the Croke Villas development, has collapsed. We will need to push the boulder up the same way unless the Government is prepared to invest money in the local authority and take up those projects itself. This would provide much-needed public service projects that would provide housing for the people who need it and employment for those in the construction industry.

The Government amendment to the motion is a work of fiction as the Minister of State must agree. The first line states "commends the Government on the prudent management of the economy in the face of difficult domestic and international trading conditions". Who in their right minds would commend the Government for the prudent management of the economy? It has made a dog's dinner of the economy in recent years. This is the third Administration the Minister of State's party has been in and the situation has gone from bad to worse. The second line states "welcomes the continued job creation and confidence expressed in our economy by business investors and the number of recent investment decisions taken across a range of sectors in the regions". Did we lose 17,000 jobs last month? That is the figure but, according to the Minister of State, we have confidence in the economy and jobs are being created.

Let us look at the retail sector. The Minister of State's last point concerned value for money for consumers and support for the Irish retail sector. Everybody is going across the Border. One cannot get into Newry now. There are queues of three, four and five hours on weekends. My constituents go up from Dublin to purchase in Belfast, going on the train or driving. It is the same right across the Border, on the line from Galway to Dublin. That is where the retail sector is suffering. What is the Government doing about it? It introduced the stealth taxes we have seen in so many areas. It increased VAT on goods and the situation is going from bad to worse.

In my view, the Government is doing zilch. There is no plan. When the Minister of State gets a plan and tells us what it is, then we can get out there and see whether we can make some progress in getting the economy back up and running.

See this speech in context