Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)

The Deputy has asked a number of questions and made a number of assertions again. She fundamentally misunderstands, maybe deliberately or maybe not, the Government intention in this regard. We negotiated the programme for Government against the backdrop, as I indicated to Deputy Wallace, of the incredible shortage of capital for investment in new jobs in this economy. We debated how we could have access to it, and the NewERA concept from Fine Gael was to look at what they did in the early years of the State. The originator of that idea came from the ICTU, at least that is what they told us when we met them in advance. That was their concept. It was to see how we could use resources by amalgamating the resources of the semi-State companies. The NewERA entity is a progression on that. I do not suggest that ICTU would support it but the idea would be to examine how we could hand over some of the current semi-State organisations and use the capital asset value derived from that to invest in the next generation of State jobs.

It is not a contradiction to seek resources, for example, to invest in the new Irish water company, Water Ireland because, we hope it will be the next Bord na Móna in terms of being a job creator to provide sustainable water, ensure communities can thrive and so on. Many good ideas will be presented when we have access to money. There will not be a fire sale.

The Deputy opposite in particular loves announcing the bad news such that we were not going to be able to reduce the interest on our borrowings or maintain the minimum wage and that we would not be able to do anything, but we have done all these things. When the time is right we will sell non-strategic assets and use the proceeds derived to grow the next generation of jobs. That is the ambition we have.

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