Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent)

The Minister must surely agree that the relationship between the export figures and the number of people involved looks unusual. For example, I believe the top three export companies in Ireland at the moment are Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft and Google. They export over €24 billion in products and services and account for 15% of our exports. Given that they account for 0.3% of the workforce, that is a bit uneven. The pharmaceutical industry has exports worth over €56 billion, yet employs only 2.6% of the workforce. It looks from the figures as if each worker is producing €1.2 million worth of work each year. Clearly there are sales funnelled through this country for tax avoidance purposes which are inflating these figures.

If the Government is serious about job creation, we need to look more closely at doing something for the domestic economy. We need to look at the rates structure, which is linked to our poor local government structure, our huge energy costs, upward only rent reviews, which I know are difficult to deal with-----

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