Eamon Ryan (Dublin South, Green Party)

I have a sense that the nation is battered and bruised but not beaten. If there was one line in yesterday's speech that gave people hope and lifted their spirits, it was that the worst is over, if I am quoting the Minister correctly. We need a sense of where we are going and of hope. The debate can change. There was a strong sense of the country being terrified until yesterday and I would hate to see us slip into thinking that economic stabilisation has occurred and that it is the end in itself. That is not the goal. The Government must provide financial stability but it is not the end or the purpose. We must do more than that. There must be a sense of vision of what the stability serves and how we work from that. That is important in the debate that continues next week and into the new year on where the country is going. We are at a moment of profound change in the history of the nation, the world and the nature of the globalised market system that has been consistent for the past 30 years. It has changed utterly in the past year. We must develop a different sense of where the nation is going in respect of this new and evolving world.

I will set out my thoughts on how the budget fits into where we are going. What we might call the new republic that we must create must have a number of characteristics. It has to be enterprising. We must take on some of the thinking that has been around for the past 30 years. I am old enough to remember the Telesis report which stated that we should start to rely on our natural resources, not on foreign direct investment. The Culliton report in the 1990s and the enterprise strategy group five or six years ago repeated that advice. We are at a moment when we must start to do that. We continue to be a good centre for international companies but we have evolved and grown sufficiently, and have enough skills to start to be enterprising in our own right, and to trade internationally on the back of those skills.

I understand the Sinn Féin Members' fears about emigration. I fully agree with them but we should have the confidence now, when it is difficult to emigrate, to stay and develop businesses here, rather than look for alternatives. That has to be our goal and our overriding ambition. We will keep our people at home and create the work opportunities here rather than seeing emigration as an alternative.

See this speech in context