Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

If the Taoiseach continues to lead this country in the way he is and if he continues on the road he prescribed in his speech, he will lead it to ruin. He told us that there is little point in looking back at how some of this might have been anticipated or avoided. From a Government that has been in office for 11 years, the Taoiseach has some neck to say there is little point in looking back; there is every point in looking back because the pilot who crash landed this economy is hardly the pilot who will take off this economy and lead us back out of this recession.

At the end of his contribution, the Taoiseach invited us to work as a team. We are willing to work as a team, but we want to know what is the game. The Taoiseach has not told us. He has not outlined any set of proposals. He has not said anything in his contribution to this House today to which any member of the Opposition can constructively respond because there are no new proposals coming from Government today.

We are at a moment of grave national crisis. It would be difficult to overstate the depth of the economic emergency that now faces our country and people. The extent of our difficulties is well known, even if their cause is not admitted and the cure is disputed.

It is not necessary for me to rehearse the full litany of statistics that describe the fall in economic output, the threat to our banking system or the spiralling gap in our public finances. This is not a debate about statistics, it is about people. It is about the 300,000 of our people now signing on the live register, queuing down the street in the rain, trying to collect social insurance to which they contributed, caught up in an unfamiliar bureaucracy which seeks to deny them and which often humiliates them. It is about elderly people who have watched helplessly as their bank shares have collapsed in value and, in the case of Anglo Irish Bank, have been extinguished. It is about the unrelenting dread of a parent who wakes each morning to the fear of losing the family home. It is about the best and brightest of what would have been our most fortunate generation graduating once again to the emigrants' aeroplane. It is at this moment that our people look here, to the Dáil and Government for leadership. People want to know if there is somebody, somewhere in Government, who has a grip on this situation. What they will see today is the Dáil gathered to debate a Government plan that does not exist, drafts of which it is not allowed to see, including a set of cuts that the Cabinet will not publish

This is an economic crisis, but it needs a political solution. It requires a Government that is clearly in command of the situation in everything it says and does. The nucleus of a modern economy is trust. From the moment money replaced barter as the means of exchange, economies became dependent on trust. In the global economic turmoil that has followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers Bank, trust has been in short supply. The first function of Government is to make up that shortfall.

That means bringing forward a national recovery plan that will address the economic crisis, comprehensively and coherently. It should be a plan that shows the Government has a grip on the situation, a plan that will allay fear and chart a course out of recession. It should be a plan not to shrink the economy, but to stimulate it. The question is not what can be cut, but what can be created.

I do not suggest that this can be done without pain. It cannot. However, one must know what it is one wishes to achieve. Is it to re-boot the economy, protect jobs and restore growth? Or does one wish to focus solely on one component of the problem, namely, the public finances, and, in so doing, risk a downward spiral of cuts and economic contraction?

The recovery plan should be based on what I call the three Cs, namely, confidence among consumers, credibility among investors and competitiveness on world markets. It is an understatement to say that consumer confidence is low. It would be more accurate to say that consumers are petrified. The ESRI consumer confidence indicator has fallen to historic lows and retail sales are collapsing. The latest figures from the CSO, which relate to November, report the largest annual fall in retail sales since April 1975. A survey of retailers published last weekend in the Sunday Business Post suggests a fall of 10% in the fourth quarter of 2008, compared to the same quarter of 2007. This indicates a significant rise in the savings rate consequent on a loss of confidence. Many people have lost their jobs, but a lot of people have not. They simply are not spending money.

The Government can act to restore confidence by addressing fear head on. The one thing people fear more than losing their job is losing their home. It would allay much of the fear among consumers if there were to be a guarantee that, for the duration of the recession, nobody will lose their home.

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