Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

I have been raising the issue of employment and the loss of jobs since long before the collapse of Lehman Brothers and long before the banking crisis and the official start of the recession in this country. The reality is that since Deputy Cowen became Taoiseach the country has lost on average 320 jobs a day. This is the 16th month that the live register figures are over 400,000. One in every three on the live register is out of work for over a year.

There is an urgency about getting people back to work and it is very much about how one does it. The Labour Party has suggested that one of the ways of doing that is by establishing a strategic investment bank. If the Taoiseach had read the document — clearly, he has not — he would have seen that the proposal was to take €2 billion from the National Pensions Reserve Fund to use to leverage another €20 billion to ensure that credit is made available to small and medium sized business because, as the Taoiseach well knows, it is not happening from the mainstream banks despite their protestations. It would also make money available for the financing of the capital programme. We know there is a problem with the financing of the capital programme because of the restrictions on the public finances. We know that the PPP model is not now operating and we must look at different ways of ensuring that there is finance available to advance the capital programme which would get people back to work, for example, in construction.

The Taoiseach correctly stated that construction is one of the areas where there has been a significant drop in the numbers of people in employment. People can be got back to work in construction through the public programmes to build the schools and hospitals that need to be built. They can also be got back to work in the retrofitting and renewal of buildings, and in the area of energy conservation. However, it needs some means of being financed and this was one point on which the Labour Party argued for it.

As for the retail area, which the Taoiseach rightly identified as having experienced a significant fall in employment, Deputy Ciarán Lynch made a proposal in this House on behalf of the Labour Party in which he stated that one problem identified by the retail sector was that retailers were unable to revise downwards the rents into which they were locked when times were good. I refer to those who went into some of the new glossy shopping centres and who, before being let units in such locations, had their arms twisted to accept extortionately high rates of rent and who now cannot review them downwards. Deputy Ciarán Lynch put forward a set of proposals in this House that would have allowed for the downward revision of rents in these different times but the Government voted them down. Moreover, the Minister gave a convoluted answer involving the Attorney General, legal reasons and so on. These are practical proposals.

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