Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

These cost controls must also be applied in the public sector, where there must be stronger efforts to control input costs, including professional fees, but also costs such as those relating to drugs and other elements of supply chain management.

For all the doom and gloom of this emergency, the Irish economy actually has a great future. The real Celtic tiger was an export-led boom before Fianna Fáil turned it into a property bubble. Last week, I had the opportunity to meet with officials from the Irish development agencies based in New York. They are doing excellent work and it is clear that there are enormous opportunities for Ireland in sectors such as food, tourism and alternative energy.

Ireland is, and will continue to be to be, an attractive location for foreign investment. Our relationship with the US is vital but we must also recognise that the centre of gravity in global trade is shifting to the east. The new world economic powers - Brazil, Russia, India and China - present a great opportunity for Ireland to develop new export markets. However, building up our business with these countries will require greater resources and strong political commitment, including trade missions led by Government Ministers. This is an area where the Government must lead.

Labour has been strongly supportive of the knowledge economy, if not of the increasingly discredited buzz phrase "the smart economy". A knowledge economy is one where innovation is pursued in every sector and region not just in a small number of specialist areas. We must maintain our investment in science but we must do far more to promote applied and downstream research, which is focused on commercialisation of new ideas.

We must get away from the notion that innovation only happens in laboratories. Innovation can happen in any business and in any region, and tourism is a key example of this. There are tourism businesses in every county in Ireland offering career opportunities across a range of skill levels. Whereas core values such as good service are essential, the industry has been profoundly affected by the information technology revolution, and that change will continue. Having a coherent tourism strategy and delivering on it is essential, as has been proposed in Deputy Upton's excellent document on the subject.

Equally, Ireland has natural advantages in areas such as clean technology and food. Our food sector is still too reliant on exporting goods with limited value added to the UK. We must see agriculture as Ireland's great raw material and develop our food industries accordingly. We need a whole of enterprise approach but we must also look in detail at specific sectors and how they perform.

The role of the industrial development agencies will be critical and we must encourage the agencies to take more risks, be prepared to fail and to take a longer view on where they put their resources, particularly in building up our presence in India and China. We need a network of enterprise support that covers firms of all sizes, including start-ups but also focusing on scale-ups. Ireland needs to do more to keep the companies that we develop and grow rather than getting a start-up to a certain size and then selling the company to a multinational. We need to look at providing more support to firms that are over the size limit to avail of support from country enterprise boards but which are not now getting support from Enterprise Ireland.

To create jobs, we must have investment in infrastructure, firms and people. Given the limits on resources, that investment will have to come in new ways and must be strategic. Labour's strategic investment bank will act as a source of investment finance for major projects and for companies. Even with the constraints on resources we must also prioritise investment in people, and we cannot stand by as 442,000 people are looking for work. We must make a national effort, including both public and private sectors, to offer educational, training and work experience opportunities to our people. Many are already highly educated but need experience. Some have been working but need to address educational needs. There is no "one size fits all" scheme that will deal with this need. What we need, as outlined in Labour's policy document Just the Job, is a range of schemes meeting a range of needs. This costs money but relatively small amounts. Our proposals would cost approximately €230 million in the short term but would save money because people will get off the dole queues more quickly.

Labour has been responsible in Opposition and we will be responsible in Government. We opposed the banking guarantee because it handed the banks a blank cheque and we have been proven correct in doing so.

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