Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)

Sadly, this Finance Bill is a caricature of a real job creation strategy. This is all against a background of almost 500,000 of our people unemployed, the spectre of long-term unemployment within that cohort increasing and thousands of young people leaving the country yearly. In all of this hardship, we have had a consistently reducing scale of ambition by the Government parties from the general election campaign through to the programme for Government and lastly with the announcement of the jobs initiative. Fine Gael's election programme spoke about creating 100,000 net jobs up to 2015 while the Labour Party promised a strategic investment bank and other such measures. Yet, the Minister for Finance could not put any figure on the number of jobs that will be created by this jobs initiative when he unveiled it. When I pushed him in the Chamber, he said some of the agencies involved referred to a figure of 6,000.

T.S. Eliot's somewhat appropriately named poem, "The Hollow Men", comes to mind:

Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Shadow.

There is a massive shadow between what Fine Gael and Labour promised through their posturing in the course of the general election campaign and the reality of the proposals contained in the Finance (No. 2) Bill. The Government is tinkering around with taxes and VAT which are really peripheral when compared to the scale of work needed to be done in job creation. The Government reminds me of a child with a new toy; when it presses a button, the toy will perform the tricks it would like to see. That is about as optimistic as we can be when it comes to this Bill's proposals.

For example, the initiative has a huge reliance on the tourism industry to assist job creation. I hope tourists will visit Ireland in large numbers. We want to see good jobs in tourism which is why my party opposed the rush to drive down the wages of many workers in the sector as has been discussed at the joint labour committees in the past several months. The Government, however, has put a weight of expectation on the tourism industry that is simply unachievable.

The Government organised two major State visits, one by the Queen of England and the other by the President of the United States. It appears the Government then had the idea of hitching the depressed tourism industry to these royal horses so the industry could turn into a magic carriage that would bring us tens of thousands of visitors as a result. Unfortunately, real life is not like that. There needs to be a reality check on the specific measures proposed in the jobs initiative. The idea that removing a €3 tax on airline tickets will result in a clamour of front doors banging shut from Land's End to John o'Groats as people in England rush to their nearest airport to visit Ireland does not belong in the real world.

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