Michael Noonan (Limerick East, Fine Gael)

Is it one of the Department of Finance scenarios? Departmental officials mentioned €15 billion fairly strongly, among other scenarios. Is it an ESRI prediction? It also mentioned €15 billion. The key element is the forecast for growth and there is a vast variation between Davy's forecast, which would take us over €20 billion, and the ESRI high growth forecast, which would bring us down to €9 billion. The Minister is on the mid point so maybe he is right, but we are not buying in. We need more information. We certainly need to know how the Minister built up his forecast and we need answers to Deputy Gilmore's questions on the elements and factors that were put in to build up that forecast.

The concentration is now on the €15 billion and the ways and means. The Minister says he will front-load the 2011 budget, which he will introduce on 7 December. A month ago a correction of €7.5 billion was announced, and look what has happened in a month. At that time, the Minister stated that he would make a €3 billion cut in the first budget. When he went to Galway on that infamous occasion, he said €3 billion was a minimum figure. The figure of €3 billion is 40% of €7.5 billion, so the front-loading was to have been 40%. An equivalent front-loading of €15 billion would be €6 billion. Will the Minister take €6 billion out on 7 December? Will he do the same proportion of front-loading as he intended a month ago, or will he do something less? If he is looking for some element of ongoing co-operation from the Opposition, that is an absolutely essential figure for us to know. We also need to know the other intermediary annual targets up to 2014.

What is the actual deficit for 2011? The ultimate target is 3% by 2014. However, when a race or contest is being organised, it is not enough to know the finishing line. One also needs to know the starting position. What will the starting position be on 7 December? It was Government policy to bring the deficit below 10%. In the last budget, the Minister announced that the deficit for 2011 would be less than 10%. This contained a suggestion that if we did not have a deficit low enough to convince the markets to lend, we would be in difficulty in January. Now that we have agreed that 3% in 2014 is the finish of the race, what is the Minister's starting point on 7 December? Will he go soft? Will the budget deficit be 11%, 11.5% or 10.5% of GDP? Will he go below 10%? He needs to come up with this figure pretty quickly. I will not press him any harder on this; I am simply speculating. I have no information as to his thinking on this but this is an essential piece of information. Unless we know the starting point we do not know where the Minister is going.

When we move away from the targets we can look at an economic strategy to get the country moving again and to give it the shock that will turn the declining circle into an ascending circle. The Minister falls down badly in concentrating all the time on fiscal correction. If the debate is only about how much we will cut and how much we will tax, all the people with money on deposit in the banks will neither spend nor invest. We have to get onto a more optimistic programme which provides jobs and economic growth in parallel with the fiscal correction.

The economic plan for jobs and growth will be along the lines of the NewERA document authored and published by Deputy Coveney. I appreciate that circumstances in the semi-State sector have changed since that document was published two years ago and it will have to be updated but the concept remains the same, namely, the need to invest in new infrastructure. This country needs to find the wherewithal to invest in all the things that are important to a modern economy.

We have resources, such the money that was put into the National Pensions Reserve Fund for a rainy day. I recall Charlie McCreevy's thinking when he established the fund. His assertion that it would preserve our pensions for the future was really a sales pitch for taking money out of circulation because he was afraid of inflation. I am not saying the money will not be needed for pensions but given the way the economy is going, there will be nobody around to draw pensions. The fund was always intended for investments in Ireland as well as in the four corners of the world. The reason it did not invest in this country, even when large sums of money were earmarked for the domestic economy, was because Ireland was awash with cheap money on the interbank market. That flow of money is what got Anglo Irish Bank and the rest of the financial institutions into trouble.

It is possible now to invest in domestic infrastructure on a commercial basis while giving a boost to the Irish economy. I will give one example from the greens around the House. People do not want domestic water charges but we are prepared to charge them for wasting water on a metered basis. One can boil the kettle, take a shower or use the bathroom for nothing but it is fair that one should pay for washing the car or running the hose over the allotment for three days to grow greener cabbage than the woman next door. The essential element of any pension fund is a revenue flow because that facilitates investment through a PPP scheme.

The NPRF is not the only solution. Some of our semi-State organisations have healthy balance sheets, despite the crazy politically driven investments in things like grids in Northern Ireland which upset the ESB's balance sheet. The advantage of semi-State companies is that they always have capital programmes and can invest in new infrastructure.

Another solution is suggested by the review conducted by Colm McCarthy to identify the State assets and agencies that are no longer essential or strategic and, as a result, can be sold off. I do not propose that we sell at the bottom of the market. We could use the NPRF money and, if we feel we have to replenish it subsequently, we can do so through the sale of assets. That was done on previous occasions.

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