Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)

I will be as brief as I can. I am interested in considering and will cost any proposal from the other side of the House. We will give Members the facility to do that - they may already have been invited to do so - in a Chinese wall way, whereby proposals may be costed before they are submitted on the floor of the House.

In terms of the capital spend, we are charged with making political decisions in terms of what is affordable within the total volume of expenditure. That is what Government does. We must address our enormous deficit and return to affordable patterns of expenditure. The projected deficit this year will be of the order of 10.3% and our target for next year is 8.6%. By international standards, that amounts to an extraordinarily high level of borrowing to fund the Exchequer. In addition, we have an overhang of crippling private banking debt which was imposed on us by the previous Government. We have worked might and main to limit that as best we can, and have already achieved reductions in the applicable interest rates. The Taoiseach is in Germany today putting forward our case in this regard. We are working on ideas all the time to reduce the quantum of debt on the State so that we can restore equilibrium and return to making rational decisions for ourselves without being overseen by others. That is the general approach.

I would love to be able to say that we could proceed with the A5 project, but the reality is that I do not have the necessary STG£400 million to match the contribution of the Northern Ireland authorities. Going ahead with that project would mean having to abandon other critical infrastructural projects elsewhere on the island. We must be very careful in all of the choices we make. Other projects which were expected to proceed, such as the completion of the M11 to my home constituency, will not happen within the timeframe that was originally envisaged. The south east will be as deprived as the north west in that sense.

See this speech in context