Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

The problem is that the Government is not giving sufficient priority to employment and to dealing with the problem of unemployment. What the Taoiseach seems to be saying is that if we sort out the banks and the public finances, a recovery in employment will happen as a consequence. There are a couple of things wrong with that argument. First, we are pumping large amounts of borrowed money into the banks, including €3 billion into Anglo Irish Bank recently, and the banks are not lending. Credit is not flowing in the economy to enable businesses to generate employment and save jobs. Second, the Taoiseach argues that if the public finances are sorted out, economic recovery will follow. However, let us take, for example, the speculation, which the Taoiseach was not inclined to pursue yesterday, that €1.5 billion would be taken out of the social welfare budget. If employment rises to the level he is expecting - 15% or 15.5% - that will wipe out any savings made on that side. It follows that the Government cannot either help the economy recover or put the public finances back in order without dealing with the issue of employment.

The difficulty I have with the Government's approach is that it does not seem to be sufficiently urgent. For example, last December it announced with great fanfare a plan for Ireland's smart economy. It was a plan the Labour Party agreed with; we had been talking about such a plan for some time. However, it took the Government six months to appoint a task force to advance it. It only appointed one last week. If it was serious about trying to create employment and get the economy moving it would be showing a little more urgency and would not have taken six months to set up a task force to advance the proposals, many of which are good ones, to develop a smart economy.

We had the same thing yesterday. The Taoiseach mentioned a proposal, about which he has been talking to ICTU, to provide €250 million in assistance, although it is debatable whether this is sufficient, to retain existing employment, but he was not in a position to tell us how many jobs it would actually protect. The information he gave was extremely vague. The difficulty is, on a day when we heard that record numbers of people are unemployed, that the Government is not giving sufficient priority to getting people back to work.

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