Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

I am rather surprised and a little shocked that the Minister will not be very much involved in examining the details of the October Exchequer figures. The deflationary spiral is all about tax revenues falling. Much of the Minister's budget strategy appears to be around cuts, which will further deflate spending capacity and receipts of taxes such as VAT. He referred to the UK. Does he agree that the single most disastrous mistake he made as Minister for Finance was to raise the higher VAT rate by 0.5%, which has sent hundreds of thousands of people across the Border to shop in Northern Ireland?

In regard to employment figures, the Minister acknowledged the figures were deteriorating even if the rate of unemployment was slowing down. Does he agree that we are looking at close to 500,000 people being unemployed and that one in five of the people on the live register are now under 25 years of age? Has he had a chance to study the comments made by Professor Blanchflower, a recognised international expert on youth employment-----

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