Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael)

It is not the college debating society. Winning the argument does not get one anywhere. We are trying to take this country from the situation it is in, where it has lost sovereignty over its economic and financial affairs. We are trying to keep people at work. We are trying to keep the health services, education services and the criminal justice system intact. We want our people to continue to be paid, we want the kids to go to school and we want the ill to go to hospitals to be cured. It is not going to be easy. I am optimistic by nature. My job, as a member of the Government, is to take it forward day by day, week by week, month by month, so that we get ashore, we get out of the situation we are in and we get back to where we have economic growth again, where our debt is declining and is eventually wiped out, where our banks are recapitalised and where they are performing and lending the credit stream necessary to give us growth. That is what we are doing and we are working at it every day for the past three months, and we have made very considerable progress.

All I can do for Deputy Doherty is lay out the facts in front of him. If he wants to scaremonger and frighten the children, and talk about the bogeyman coming down the chimney in two years' time, he should go right ahead and do so. I prefer to try to encourage people to be a bit confident to get back to work, to all pull together in the interests of this country, have a sense of solidarity and, I believe, we will get there.

Deputy Doherty can give me all the arithmetical puzzles he likes, but what I will do is lay out the facts. We have the support of the IMF stating we will achieve the targets in the bailout package. The Commission states we will achieve the targets. Our colleagues in Europe openly state now, publicly and privately, that we are totally different from Greece and Portugal and that if we stick with it and if we get some growth in the economy, we will succeed.

There is a simple decision to be made. Deputy Doherty can put his strength at the end of the rope and pull with us or he can stay with the knockers and keep knocking, but what we are going to do we are going to do.

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