Tommy Broughan (Dublin North East, Labour)

The ongoing unemployment catastrophe remains one of the greatest challenges facing our country. The April CSO figures remain shockingly high, with just under 440,000 of our fellow citizens signing on the dole, constituting an incredible rate of 14.6%. The financing of this package - the pension funds levy of 0.6%, producing €470 million per annum - is controversial and starkly reveals the extent of the EU-ECB-IMF straitjacket in which our Ministers are operating. Ireland has an unemployment disaster and even the modest proposals of yesterday must be run past the ruling foreign troika and be revenue neutral.

Ironically, the jobs initiative itself highlights the desperate situation our nation faces. In recent days, we learned that Greek Government debt is passing 160% of GDP and Professor Nouriel Roubini is predicting that Greece will find it difficult to meet its fiscal targets because of the malign impact of fiscal tightening on the economy. Indeed, Greece must run a 6% surplus up to 2040 if it is even to attempt to do this. Clearly Ireland is not Greece, but the devastating budget cuts of 2009, 2010 and 2011 are imposing increasing hardships on our people and cannot go on for three or four more years.

Like many other citizens and students of economics, I was struck by the powerful and accurate analysis by Professor Morgan Kelly last weekend. His prediction that Ireland, unless we dramatically change course, will have a debt mountain of €250 billion - a quarter of a trillion euro - by 2014 is an appalling prospect that cannot be allowed to happen. Professor Kelly has accurately identified profound errors by Central Bank Governor Patrick Honohan who, upon entering the euro bailout, repeated the disgraceful mistakes of his predecessors at the Central Bank by completely miscalculating bank loan losses and pushing our country into the arms of the ECB and IMF. Professor Kelly's prediction of imminent national bankruptcy has, as expected, been shrugged off by the Government, which is still negotiating desperately just to get a 1% cut in the bailout interest rate. President Sarkozy is still saying, "Non". However, the Taoiseach, with all the insouciance of the captain of the Titanic, continues to sail towards the iceberg of national bankruptcy and ruin. Like that captain, and as Morgan Kelly noted, the Taoiseach and Minister for Finance are still turning the tiller in the wrong direction.

I agree with Professor Kelly that no responsible Irish Government can simply burn €10 billion and more of its annual taxes and loan finance in bailout interest repayments and crazy promissory note repayments during the next decade. Subtracting the banking losses repayment from our fiscal position, we are already significantly on course towards balancing our fiscal current account following the awful cuts of the past three years. With fair and balanced taxes, including the fair taxation of our elites, as Stephen Collins, the distinguished journalist, has rightly written recently, we can move towards fiscal independence again in a relatively short time.

There must be a fundamental restructuring of the bailout. Any such negotiation on the fundamental restructuring of our banking debt with the ECB must involve a significant haircut to ECB and bondholder debt, as Deputy Mathews pointed out yesterday. Following such a fundamental restructuring of banking debt, the Government might then propose to the House a jobs initiative that would perhaps spend €2 billion, €3 billion, €4 billion or more, as planned in our election manifestos, and make a serious dent in the horrendous unemployment figures the jobs initiative should target.

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