Kieran O'Donnell (Limerick East, Fine Gael)

I thank the Minister of State.

This is a serious debate but it makes little sense to have it at this point. Instead, it should take place after the framework document is issued. The Minister, Deputy Dempsey, was in the Chamber for ten minutes and never mentioned in his contribution what the Government intends to do. He did not refer to any of the policies it intends to bring forward. Nor was there any mention of the difficulties people are experiencing in terms of losing jobs and being unable to meet mortgage repayments. There was no reference to the pressures being experienced by the owners of small businesses to continue to pay the wages of their staff. He spoke about good old fashioned bully-boy political tripe that serves no purpose for the people of Ireland in the context of the position in which they now find themselves. Furthermore, he has left the Chamber.

I thought this debate was about engaging in discourse on dealing with the economy as we now find it. Why are we in this mess? I will not attribute to the Government the problems prevailing in the international economy, but I will deal objectively with the Government pushing the growth of the construction sector. In 2001, growth in Irish exports was of the order of double digits. We are a small open economy. In 2003, our trade in exports was in a negative position, while the growth in the housing construction was going out of control. The Government took the easy option. What is worse, it did not even have the confidence to assert how vulnerable we were in having everything reliant on the construction sector as we moved forward.

When moneys were flowing in, the Government was like a depot waiting for the cash to come in and then spending it, but it was spending money on services that were not sustainable into the future. It misled the people and provided services that were not sustainable. We now find ourselves in a position where the Government will have to borrow €18 billion this year. It can be compared to a business, it has an overdraft and the surcharges are beginning to hit in that we are paying nearly double the rate paid by Germany to borrow money abroad. The question is how long will we be even able to borrow money.

The Minister, Deputy Dempsey, spoke of issues that are of no relevance to the position in which we as a country find ourselves. I will call on the Government after next Tuesday, when the framework document has been agreed by the social partners, to allow us to debate it, go through it and deal with the issues that have been raised.

Positive measures are needed. Deputy Kenny brought forward one of the most practical measures needed this morning. He asked the Taoiseach to require the Department of Finance, together with the governor of the Central Bank and the Financial Regulator, to give a breakdown of all loans taken out by small businesses and all mortgages taken out by home owners who are experiencing difficulty making repayments to facilitate a valid discussion on how much it would cost to deal with the debts of these people. However, €7.5 billion of the National Pensions Reserve Fund or nearly half of it will be put into banks, one of them being Anglo Irish Bank, which effectively is a zombie bank. This is taxpayers' money. We do not even know how much it will cost us. Why has the PricewaterhouseCoopers report on the banks not been published? What we need are the facts.

In my previous career I practised as an accountant for many years. If a person in financial difficulty came to see me, I would ask him or her to fully outline their financial position to enable me to address the difficulties presented. The Government is not doing that. It is in denial. Clearly, it does not know what it is doing and it does not understand that people are worried about their security of their jobs. We are grossly uncompetitive. We have lost 33% in terms of national price competitiveness in the past eight years. The Government has no structure in place to address this.

A number of points are worth taking on board. A radical strategy needs to be put in place to ensure that the jobs of these 100,000 people in question are retained. If people have jobs, they can afford to pay their mortgages. Furthermore, they will not pose a charge on the State in terms of social welfare benefits. Neither will they have to worry about their children's education. If these people lose their jobs, they will lose dignity and hope. I did not see the word "hope" in the Taoiseach's speech, all we heard was negativity. He used the words "unexpectedly rapid collapse of the activity in the construction sector". The dogs on the street knew that the construction sector was in trouble. The Taoiseach used the word "unexpected" and he expects the people to take the Government seriously. The Government lacks credibility on an enormous scale as to exactly what it will do to address this matter.

We need to come up with a policy to protect the mortgages of home owners. People are worried about losing their homes. When the recapitalisation scheme is going through for the other banks, we need to demand that they provide measures to protect homes and that they provide funding to small businesses. Small businesses are not getting access to funding. If we recapitalise the banks for no reason other than to allow them to write off their bad debts, that will not be good enough.

People who are following this debate will note that Seán FitzPatrick had a loan of €87 million from the bank. In the 2007 accounts he was recorded as a non-executive director. He was not even working for the bank at that time and he received €413,000, nearly half a million euro, in director's fees. How can the Government expect people to take what it is putting forward as credible when it appears, on the surface, to be bailing out the banks, not looking after small business and mortgage holders and not protecting jobs?

Our challenge and that of the Government is to keep people in jobs. We must examine radical measures, be it through the social welfare system or otherwise, to enable employers to keep people in jobs. We must return to being competitive. We have a glorious opportunity during the next few years to restore our competitiveness. I did not see a reference to that in the Taoiseach's speech today.

I take grave offence at the Minister, Deputy Dempsey, insulting the House by not dealing with the issues in this debate. We are the fastest declining country in Europe. The position now is not like that in the 1980s when the debt was Government debt, now it is not only Government debt but private debt. The Government pushed our debt from the State sector to the private sector and now people are losing their homes and their jobs. In response to addressing these issues, we got a performance from the Minister, Deputy Dempsey, that put Ballymagash in the shade. That is not good enough. When the framework document has been dealt with by with the social partners, I want the Government to allow us to debate it, to restore dignity to the House and for it to act as a government rather than behaving in an insulting way towards this House and, by implication, towards the Irish people.

We are in this mess for two reasons. First, it is due to the Government's over-reliance on the construction sector. We were not able to withstand the external shocks in terms of the slowdown in the international economy and ours is now the fastest declining country in Europe. Second, the Government has not brought forward any measures in terms of job creation, job retention, mortgage protection or in terms of moneys flowing to the banks. Addressing this problem is not rocket science. It is about knowing about how business operates, dealing with the situation and ensuring that the Government does not use the social partners as nothing more than a political shield.

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