Denis Naughten (Roscommon-South Leitrim, Fine Gael)

With the agreement of the House, I wish to share my time with Deputies O'Dowd and Clune.

Let me put some scale on the deficit we face. If we pay back one euro every single second it will take us 465 years to pay back the €15,000,000,000 deficit we will face next year, and that is only one year's deficit. Things are not beyond hope. In the 1980s, the International Monetary Fund was at our door and there was much doom and gloom, perhaps even more than now because everything seemed impossible to overcome. However, we did overcome and we had sustainable job creation throughout the 1990s. Then of course, we had the Progressive Democrat philosophy of the noughties, which was shared by some of the leaders of Fianna Fáil who led us down the road of destruction to where we are today. I remember the comments that were made about my colleague, Deputy Richard Bruton, who was ridiculed when he raised genuine questions about what was happening. A former leader of the country told Opposition Members they should consider committing suicide because we were asking genuine and real questions that needed to be asked.

The blame game will not get us out of the mess we are in. Our jobs, as politicians, must be to give a future to young people. The Government is currently focused on the urgent and not on the important. We need to focus on the future, on jobs and on medium-term growth plans not just on the fire brigade action. Without this we cannot provide hope. The most vulnerable in our communities, the working poor, those who cannot work, children, disabled people and the elderly must not be sacrificed to address the budget stabilisation measures. They did not cause the problems or the mess we are in today and they did not benefit from the boom.

We need a Government that is willing to make a real difference and help those who want to help themselves. We have enough of Government being run for the people who are in it. Instead, we need a Government that will work for the people who elect it and pay for it. Deputies and those who are not covered by the Croke Park agreement must lead by example and have their wages cut significantly. We will get absolutely no thanks, or even an acknowledgment, for it but we need to be seen to lead by example. This must be done.

I look to my own constituency of Roscommon-South Leitrim, which is similar to every other rural constituency. The likelihood of creating jobs by bringing a big multinational player into the constituency is slim. In the current climate, we need to focus on what we are good at by supporting local indigenous employment, small businesses and the agri-food and tourism sectors. For example, we should use the public tendering process to support indigenous businesses by making it easier for Irish SMEs to win public tenders. It is critical that an environment be created in which SMEs can cost-effectively participate in public tendering processes. If the system is cost-effective for the small or medium enterprise, it will also benefit the purchasing agency. The tendering process has been structured in such a manner across Europe but this Government never considers indigenous companies.

We need to promote entrepreneurship at all levels of our education system and support access to loans and bureaucracy-free public funding. The Minister spoke about the Leader programme, the problem with which is one needs a degree to complete the application process. Surely it makes sense to streamline the 70 agencies which are at present involved in supporting small businesses.

We need to acknowledge that our agri-food sector is a vital part of the indigenous economy and, with 20,000 people dependent on it for employment, crucial to small and medium enterprises. These are real businesses. We need to get rid of the unnecessary bureaucracy and red tape that surrounds the food industry. A legally binding code of practice should be put in place for the grocery sector to promote fairness, balance and transparency.

Other speakers will address aspects of the tourism industry, such as the air travel tax, but I will focus on the contribution that the artistic and creative economy can make to our economic recovery and to counteracting the negative image fostered by the Government's gross economic mismanagement. On the basis of the report of the Western Development Commission thousands of jobs can be created in this sector, which employs more than 600 people in County Leitrim and a further 500 in County Roscommon. Irish artists can help to portray more positive images of Ireland and its capacity to create and innovate. One of the winners of the Your Country, Your Call competition, a screen writer and digital media consultant called Neil Leyden, proposed a global media hub which would foster the development of an Irish content industry association and anchor the creative economy in this country.

We have to focus on our strengths because we will never balance the books until we create employment. The fundamental flaw of the Government's policy was that it ignored the issue of job creation while writing whatever cheques were required to support the banks in the hope of getting us out of our economic mess. However, this strategy has made our situation even worse and it is galling for the most vulnerable in society to see reductions in the small amount of money they receive simply to bankroll those who got us into the mess in the first place. It is time we focused on the indigenous companies that can get us out of the mess by becoming the international players of tomorrow.

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