Michael Noonan (Limerick East, Fine Gael)

The Deputy should not be upset because once he went into the press, Michael O'Leary could do no more to him. If the Government has a vendetta against Mr. O'Leary and is keeping the travel tax in place because it does not want to give him the satisfaction of saying it was wrong, that is bad politics. It could be a good supply side initiative, however. If one takes the tourism sector, five star hotels around the country are empty and nobody is using our golf courses other than the odd fox or rabbit. We have excellent self-catering accommodation and underutilised airports all over the country, including the second terminal at Dublin Airport. The investment has been made in the tourism infrastructure but it is not being used because the missing ingredients are the tourists. They have to be brought into the country. Was the Government to sit down with Michael O'Leary, the gentleman from Aer Lingus and the heads of the other carriers and offered to removed the travel tax if the airlines committed to deliver tourists, that would be a basis for negotiation. At a minimum, we could ask for €20 million to promote Ireland in Germany given that Germans are beginning to spend money again and they might fly here. These are the supply side initiatives to which I refer.

I will describe another initiative that would not cost money. The law states that rents can only be adjusted upwards. It always struck me as bizarre that a tenant cannot negotiate. Businesses are closing as a result of this law but nothing is being done about it. We will list these and other initiatives in our own policy programmes.

It appears the Government is suffering from paralysis whereby individual Ministers cannot come up with low cost, or no cost, supply side initiatives such as tweaking taxes.

Is he doing as his colleagues in Mr. Cameron's British Government are doing? There, since the election, they have had a "patent box" approach, which involves a new treatment of patents and intellectual property. If the Minister talks to those he knows in IDA Ireland and Enterprise Ireland, he will know we are already at a competitive disadvantage. The "patent box" involves only tweaking and changing the rules, which kicks into research and development and makes Britain more attractive for research and development than Ireland. It is a supply side initiative to fix this problem and it costs nothing because there is no great return on it in any case. It is very important that we would do this.

We need a credible fiscal policy going forward. I hope the Minister will, some time in November, bring forward the profiles for four budgets. He has said he will set targets for the individual budgets when he does so. I strongly suggest that when he is bringing out the budget, no matter how harsh it is, he accompanies it with a jobs and growth strategy for the economy. Otherwise, we are all going down the tubes together.

See this speech in context