Barry Andrews (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

I am pleased to address the motion this evening. Taking up from where Deputy McManus left off, we are all aware of the major challenges we face. We have all had constituents in our clinics. We are all aware of the anecdotes shared by speakers on all sides. The situation set out by the Minister for Finance last night is really alarming. He enumerated some of the figures that illustrate how deep the crisis is and I was particularly shocked to learn that one third of our income tax will be spent on interest payments on our borrowings. We all know that there is pain and that it is regretted. I want to set out why I believe our proposals on the pensions levy and other fiscal adjustment measures are the right way to go. There are many reasons for this current situation and sometimes a blind eye is turned to those factors. I refer in particular to the collapse of the international banking system, the collapse of global growth, the collapse of our own property sector, the construction boom coming to an end, unemployment and the currency situation between us and our nearest neighbour. Ireland is more vulnerable under all those headings than any of our eurozone colleagues and this point has not been stressed enough in this Private Members' debate. Ireland's international financial services sector is more prone, and as a strong exporting nation we are more open to the collapse in global growth. The UK is one of our strongest trading partners and we were therefore more open to currency fluctuations.

Many of the crystal ball gazers and the hindsight experts suggest that we should have seen all of this coming. We all know that every policy has downside risks which we try to minimise and identify. However, no one could have predicted that all of these risks would materialise at exactly the same time and that they would be mutually reinforcing. However, many people in this Chamber claim that they saw it coming and that they were derided and were the subject of many snide remarks. This was not the case.

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