Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael)

The Minister for Finance has stated he is shocked that the Opposition is opposing this deal and that there was no choice in the matter. He said that without this programme, our ability to fund the payments to social welfare recipients, the salaries of nurses, doctors, teachers and gardaí, would be extraordinarily limited and would be highly uncertain. He tells us we have no choice. This is the same Minister who stood in front of many interviewers and said the only reason we were going to the IMF and the EU for a bailout was to help the banks and that it was the fault of the banks. This is not true. The Government needs this bailout to run the country because it completely and utterly mucked up and got it wrong. The majority of this bailout, €50 billion, is to be used to run the country for the next three years. However, in its own plans, the Government maintains it requires €60 billion to run the country in the next four years. I wonder why the Government stopped short at the last €10 billion.

In 2014, a significant level of existing Government debt is due to be renewed and rolled over. What will happen then? The new Government will probably be still in office in 2014 and will have to find a lot of money to repay the debts this Government has already run up. It is not all to do with bailing out the banks.

Fine Gael's problem with this deal is not the deal itself which we know is inevitable because of the wasters in government. It is the cost of the deal and the interest rate of 5.8% which could go higher depending on market conditions. This rate is moveable. The Minister is surprised we are annoyed about the use of the National Pensions Reserve Fund. We wanted to invest the National Pensions Reserve Fund in projects which would create jobs and give a guaranteed rate of return to the fund. I refer as an example to the M3 motorway which goes through my county. That could have been built with funds from the National Pensions Reserve Fund thus giving a return to this country, not to business people in some other country. It could be also used in the production and delivery of gas, electricity and so on. These are guaranteed utilities - they will always be paid - so there is a guaranteed rate of return. What the Government is doing with the pensions reserve fund is to throw it into the black hole of the banks and say goodbye. It is "Goodnight, Irene". That is not what we want, and that is what we are annoyed about. We are also annoyed that there is no growth strategy; there is no strategy whatsoever to create jobs. Yet the Minister says we have the capacity to get ourselves out of this difficult situation. We have the capacity, perhaps, to pay the interest, at a major loss to many other projects. The opportunity cost will equate to fewer school classrooms and higher pupil-teacher ratios. Health services will get worse and waiting lists will become longer. Roads will fall apart. The snow will be needed to cover the potholes - that is how bad they will get. That is what will face this country when we have to pay out €10 billion or €11 billion in interest every year. That is just the interest, not the capital.

The Minister says we have the capacity. We can barely carry the cost of the interest, with serious difficulty, but where is the capacity to pay back the capital without some kind of strategy to create money in this country? This is a silly, stupid deal. The Minister claims that Ireland entered the negotiations not as a delinquent State that had lost fiscal control, but as a country that is funded until the middle of next year and a State whose citizens have shown remarkable resilience. He claims he went into this game of poker, as the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Innovation, Deputy O'Keeffe, calls it, in good condition. If that is the case, why did he come out with such a useless deal for this country, which will break the hearts of many taxpayers over the years ahead? We cannot afford this rate of interest. Our counterparts in Europe wanted us to take a bail-out. That was our bargaining power, which we should have used to get a deal with much lower interest. Instead, we have one with an interest rate of 5.8% at least, and even more in some areas.

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