Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

I wish to share my time with Deputy Arthur Morgan.

As the Minister of State was speaking and his colleague talked about the smart economy, I wished at times we could have some confidence that we had a smart Government. Unfortunately that might be like small children wishing for the tooth fairy to return because this Government seems hopeless. What we know is that people are tired of the Government and the sooner it goes, the sooner this country might face into some level of recovering its reputation and start on a path of recovery, which is possible but only with a change of Government.

The Minister of State spoke about his brother, the Minister for Finance. I recall seeing the headline in The Financial Times on St. Patrick's day from the Minister for Finance, a day when the country receives some welcome attention but the headline was about crony capitalism, the economy falling off a cliff or diving off a cliff - I cannot remember which expression he used - and his rather strange revelation that there were incestuous relationships in Irish capitalism between bankers and developers. Of course, as we know, the strain runs that the bankers funded the developers and the developers funded Fianna Fáil and, unfortunately, that is the core of our present dilemma. There is a worldwide recession and a collapse of the post-Washington consensus of the 1970s created by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. This Government enthusiastically bought into the idea that there is no alternative to the Washington consensus of unbridled capitalism and free markets, that no matter what happens, the market is always right. Fianna Fáil has been unable to answer the question that if the market is always right, why are we looking next year at unemployment rates spiralling potentially to 16%, rates not seen since the 1980s and a Government which seems incapable of responding at an appropriate level?

Those becoming unemployed are a diverse group of people. Large numbers are coming out of the construction sector, some of whom are very highly skilled and entrepreneurial and others with traditional construction sector skills which are self-taught. All of them have worked very hard for the past 12 to 15 years. Another group are the highly skilled and educated graduates who are finding that the contracts they had with banks and finance houses, architects and solicitors, are linked to financing construction and property development. They are aged between 28 and 42 years of age. Some have family commitments, young children and mortgages. They are losing their jobs and they are confronted with dealing with the Department of Social and Family Affairs. These people are used to using technology. They may complain about the absence of broadband in areas throughout the country but they know how to use technology. However, they cannot access public agencies on a speedy basis. They can book an aeroplane ticket to Hong Kong in a few minutes using technology but they cannot interact with the agencies of State such as the Department or FÁS. They have to go and queue instead. These are people who have been brought up to expect something different. I know some Members on the Fianna Fáil benches might think a four or five hour wait in a queue is good for the soul but if this is what Fianna Fáil Ministers regard as the appropriate response to the best people in a generation when Ireland did well, it has completely lost touch.

The boom began to fade in late 2006 and early 2007. Once the banks started selling their properties to private investors for their private, tax-subsidised pension plans in late 2006, this was the high point of the boom. From 2000 onwards, although there was quite an amount of infrastructural investment, in terms of the scale of demand of the economy it was in many ways too little. Now we are left with a substandard infrastructure which is a serious constraint on competitiveness.

Ireland has one of the lowest rates of broadband penetration in the EU. Ireland's urban public transport systems are decrepit and disjointed while public transport is not an option for many rural communities, particularly for people who want to journey between smaller towns and villages. Major growing urban areas are at risk of drought in the coming years without significant investment in our water supply and water works. Ireland's energy grid depends on carbon-intensive generation and will require significant investment to facilitate a shift to low carbon generation. Ireland's creaking public health infrastructure and hospitals are a continuing embarrassment. A total of 40,000 young children are being taught in prefabricated classrooms. Despite the fall back in productivity and employment, significant numbers of young children are entering the education system. A decade of squandered wealth is one of the greatest travesties of our economic malaise. As the economy boomed in the 1990s and the noughties, tax revenues ballooned. However, rather than investing the growing contents of the Exchequer coffers in closing our infrastructure deficit, this money was used to cut personal tax rates and provide generous tax incentives for property speculation. As a result, bottlenecks developed in the economy, our cost base rose and competitiveness deteriorated.

Our infrastructure deficit was one of the critical constraints on Irish competitiveness in the early part of this decade. Now it is one of the key constraints on our economic recovery. We talk about the reputational damage to Ireland. Foreign multinationals looking at a country to make a foreign direct investment, FDI, have a list of 40 items they tick. Unfortunately, Ireland is increasingly ticking negative in many of the boxes because of the reputational damage we have suffered. Those issues FDI was prepared to tolerate, discount and put to one side because we were seen to be agile, active, enterprising and successful, are unfortunately becoming constraints against new or continuing investment in Ireland. It becomes easy for foreign investors, who are faced with a plethora of choices around the world, to say Ireland is no longer as "hot" as it once was, and decide not to invest there or, in the next cycle of investment, not to reinvest.

We have set out a number of proposals. The Labour Party has proposed a national development bank as a way of providing in particular for off-balance sheet investment in terms of the national accounts which would allow for the injection of money into critical public infrastructure, without damaging our debt position, which is already fairly perilous. We have also suggested a number of very inventive schemes that would provide, on the lines of the investment bank in Germany, money and capital that would get certain schemes going. We have also proposed a graduate and apprentice internship training programme that would provide a bridge for those tens of thousands of young graduates and apprentices who are graduating but have no place to go.

The Irish economy was once described as agile and inventive. This Government has lost it and, as a consequence, people want to say "Goodbye" to this Government and see fresh faces and ideas, and some kind of hope injected into our economy. If we built the Celtic tiger, we are capable of plotting our salvation and economic recovery, but not with Fianna Fáil.

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