Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

-----than to come up with a shallow gesture of recognition. In the past two years 12% of Irish employment in business has disappeared, 22% of people, one in five, have taken a cut in their working hours. Some 90% of those job losses have hit people under the age of 30. These are the people who are carrying the can of the bad management of this economy. Those young people are the building blocks for the future. We cannot afford to allow, by the Minister's inactivity, those people fall prey to unemployment and emigration as occurred in the past. This budget is one where his courage has failed him. He has refused to take on the challenge of recreating a strong economy in Ireland. That could have been done by the type of policies our party has put forward, a radical programme to bring in private money to invest in the infrastructures we need to get out of the hole we are in.

We need a modern electricity network, a strong broadband system, a modern water system and we need to put sound energy efficient systems into our housing and building stock. These are things we need and the money is not there to provide them unless the Minister creates a vehicle to drive it. He has stepped back and failed in that area. That is the tragedy.

We should have seen the Minister start to address the challenge of regaining the competitiveness of Ireland and that has failed. He has offered the rhetoric of the smart economy. I heard him use words such as e-enabled, renewably resourced, smartly networked, carefully husbanded. These are words that trip off the lips of Ministers but the truth is that 40% of the water we produce leaks out of the system. We have 5% of the broadband speeds of our competitors. We fail to realise the potential of renewable energy compared to countries that do not have a fraction of what we have available to us. That is a failure of vision. It is possible for the Minister to address those issues if he had the vision to do it but that vision has failed him.

We have to break out of this vicious cycle in the public finances. Slide rule accountancy will not crack it. The Minister has made provision today for €4 billion in cuts but the 75,000 extra people he forecast will be on the dole will cost €1.5 billion in lost revenue, re-impacting the deficit. He has admitted that interest on the debt will rise by €2 billion next year, that is €3.5 billion of the €4 billion that he has pushed people so hard to deliver, has just been wiped away. We are in a vicious cycle that we are not breaking out of because the Minister sees only the narrow issue of correcting the public finances and not the wider issue of addressing the economic weakness and how we rebuild our economic strength. That has failed us in this budget.

The Minister surely had to face up to the situation regarding Anglo Irish Bank. The dogs in the street say that €6 billion will be needed for the bank during the course of this year. Where is that provided for in this budget? One cannot pretend it will come from thin air. It has to be provided for and we have to budget for it. We have to know where it will come from and if it will be added to the national debt? It is not credible until the Minister addresses those issues.

At the end of this budget the Minister will borrow close to last year's amount. We will be funding an incredible 29% of our net current spending on tick, on borrowing, which is an appalling figure. That is what the Minister has achieved having asked so many people to take pain. By 2013 his own predictions say that 71% of our income tax will be absorbed in paying interest, that is 71% of the sacrifices people make to pay income tax will be wiped away. That is a cycle the Minister has to break but it can only be broken if he has a strategy to address economic growth.

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