Brian Lenihan Jnr (Dublin West, Fianna Fail)

As Minister for Finance for the past ten months, I have submitted one budget and two rounds of expenditure adjustments to this House. Economic turmoil throughout the world and in Ireland dictated these measures. The measures that I am bringing forward today will complete this process for 2009. I assure the people that we have the capacity and the Government has the will to bring us out of this period of severe economic distress. We can work our way through our problems. We have faced adversity in the past and we have prevailed.

Many of the factors that made us an economic success story in recent years are still with us: social cohesion; political stability; a young, well educated, flexible workforce; and a pro-enterprise, export-oriented economy. All of this remains intact. What is wrong in our economy we can fix if we take the right course of action now and if each one of us signs up for that course of action.

The economic boom this country enjoyed in recent decades brought a remarkable rise in our living standards. Rapid growth in the early years was driven by exports. As in many other countries, the later stages were accompanied by a property bubble, fuelled in part by very low interest rates and the ready availability of credit. Some warned that the housing market was unsustainable. Plenty did not. The consensus view suggested a soft landing. That prediction proved wrong. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that more should have been done to contain the housing market. We became too reliant on the construction sector for growth and tax receipts.

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