Michael D'Arcy (Wexford, Fine Gael)

I want to touch on the issue of the banks. I have the business review from the NTMA from 1 July 2010. The national debt at that stage was €84 billion for the first half of this year, with a deficit of €20 billion. At the end of this year it will be €94 billion. On top of that there is €81 billion, which the NTMA states NAMA will cost, plus the costs of €45 billion we found out about today. The sum total is approximately €230 billion.

I want to be fair. Over a period of ten years, NAMA will generate some funds. The news is not all negative but it will be mostly negative. The State will owe €240 billion at the end of this year in comparison to where it was three years ago. At the time of the last general election, the national debt was approximately €35 billion. The Government has increased it almost ninefold. That is astonishing and is the dilemma we now face.

Another difficulty we face is what Mr. Michael Somers said when he spoke to the Fine Gael Parliamentary Party in Waterford. This country has an obsession with process. We cannot get things done because of the stream of red tape, criteria, rules and directives that exists. We employ an army of people to implement rules that are hindering our progress. We are told we cannot do certain things because of the rules. I will give the House a good example of what I am talking about. The Leas Cheann-Comhairle will be familiar with the Arklow Banks wind farm from his journeys up and down to Dublin. Six offshore wind turbines have been constructed, but it is planned to construct almost 200 further turbines. This €1 billion project is supposed to be financed with equity from the private equity markets, but it is not happening because someone somewhere is stopping it. Airtricity, which is promoting the project, started a similar project off the east coast of Britain at the same time, and it is now under construction. The two projects are in different jurisdictions, but they are subject to the same EU directives. It is madness that we are stopping the development of the Arklow Banks project, which would involve a number of full-time maintenance jobs.

I will conclude by speaking about small business. As a commercial dairy farmer with two employees, I am strangled by the processes involved. I encounter red tape all the way. Some 4,500 people in my district are unemployed. In County Wexford as a whole, the relevant number is 20,000. They have not chosen to be unemployed - they want to be in gainful employment so they can contribute to this country's tax take. The only way we can develop as a nation is by increasing our tax take and our GDP so that people can contribute instead of taking. Although our proposals are sound, the Government is continuing to snipe at them for the sake of it. The Government will not accept any of our ideas.

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