Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail)

I will come back to the banks shortly.

That was an example of how we used the funding and the wealth we created wisely. That is never acknowledged. We created a pension fund to which we allocated 1% of GNP. If we did not have that pension fund we would not have been in a position to recapitalise the banks, for example, or take further measures.

In addition, we have transformed the infrastructure of this country in the past ten years. I invite anyone to travel on the Cork to Dublin road, which is a different road today from the one we had ten years ago. The roads from Dublin to Galway, Waterford and Limerick have all been improved, as have railways and bus routes. Schools have been modernised, and we have dramatically increased old age pensions, child benefit and so on. There has been a dramatic transformation, all paid for by surpluses due to the wealth created in the economy over the past ten years. I do not buy the notion trotted out by Opposition spokespersons that we wasted or blew the boom. We did not.

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