Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein)

Councillors must exercise some degree of local control over the enterprise agencies.

Under its Action Plan for Jobs, the Government aims to create up to 400,000 jobs on a reduced budget. This would be next to impossible in a period of economic growth and inward investment. Right now, private investment is in serious retraction and this Government has intensified the level by pulling its own investment out of the State. That means creating jobs without funds. When the funds are going in the opposite direction it will be almost impossible. It is clear the priority is neither jobs nor people. We need not look at the words or the rhetoric but at the actions. On 31 March this State will put €3.1 billion into Anglo Irish Bank, almost seven times the amount it gave to the three enterprise agencies tasked with creating jobs, developing exports and creating foreign direct investment.

The austerity policies the Government is inflicting has pushed demand off a cliff. The decision to implement regressive taxation, including VAT increases etc, undermines the notion that the priority is jobs. If that were the case why has this Government not found a mechanism to deal with upward-only rents? These rents undermine competitiveness. The rents in this State are 100% the European average. If the minimum wage was 100% the European average this Government would engage very quickly. In the past 46 months the retail sector lost 55,000 jobs and 40,000 further jobs appear to be under major pressure. Retail Excellence Ireland recently discovered that rent accounted for between 20% and 40% of costs in retail businesses in this State, as opposed to a European average of 6.5%. Grafton Street is the second most expensive street in Europe and the fifth most expensive in the world. All other streets in the State are a formula of that expense. This is unsustainable in the medium to long term.

Fine Gael and the Labour Party are hiding behind unpublished advice from the Attorney General on this issue. We believe they have buckled under the lobby of wealthy landlords. However, Retail Excellence Ireland has legal opinion which identifies that action in this regard is possible. The proposals of micro finance and credit guarantee schemes are welcome but there is a major delay involved. This might not come about until May or June when thousands of businesses will have closed. Given that €23 billion has been put into recapitalisation of the banks in the past year the need for a loan guarantee scheme shows up the nonsense of the Government's policies. The Government should ensure the low interest rates these banks now enjoy from the ECB are passed on to small business.

The European Union has also operated the European Progress Microfinance Facility, which I mentioned to the Minister's colleague, the Minister of State, Deputy Perry. Last March €200 million was made available in this development and eleven countries drew it down. How much did Ireland draw down? The Minister has guessed it - a big fat zero.

I am pleased this Government has recognised the need to invest in and support new industries and to provide support for research and development, cloud computing and the gaming industry. However, even in the mid to long term, that potential for job creation pales into insignificance when one considers that 1,300 people leave our shores every week through emigration. Little or nothing is being done for the domestic economy even though 72% of employment is found in small and micro-sized industry. These sectors are most affected by the negative cuts of the Labour Party-Fine Gael Government. They need targeted support. In the House I asked the Minister if he would develop an emergency enterprise unit, perhaps as part of his Department or of an existing agency. I telephoned the Department which stated there was no way in which it could access or engage with businesses such as Spicers bakery, an example from a large number of small Irish businesses that have been on the go for generations but which are being forced to contract radically because of the environment they are in. A unit such as this could go into a small business, look at its costs and infrastructure and see whether there are other elements outside the core business of the company, for example, bad property debts etc, that could be hived off in some way while the core business remained functional. However, the answer seems to be no. There is hand-wringing and shaking of heads when a business closes even though it costs €20,000 per year for each individual who goes on the dole, never mind the personal costs to those individuals.

We asked the Government to do something about the size of contracts and even in this document we can see an ambition to reduce contracts. However, the Government is going in the opposite direction by centralising the entire procurement process which makes contracts bigger and makes it more difficult for small businesses to get the jobs. There is the example of Bord Gáis, which has a contract for €500 million over the coming ten years. That will have the effect of pushing out small contractors who were employed in that infrastructure until recently.

At a macro level, therefore, the Government has turned the State into a debt repayment agency. What we need is a Keynesian type of counter-cyclical stimulation. In January alone 750,000 jobs were created by the Obama Administration. The United States is obviously much bigger than Ireland and its economy is much more closed than our small open one but the Government must take a leaf from that kind of Keynesian policy. It could invest in infrastructure now. It could download funds from the European Investment Bank and the European Progress Microfinance Facility, the European investment fund and could create competitiveness. That would be jobs intensive and would also make this country attractive to foreign direct investment in future.

The second issue in which the State must involve itself is domestic business. It must cut costs and make small businesses competitive and must look at the cost of upward-only rents, credit, energy etc. The third issue is to reform the enterprise development sector giving entrepreneurs access to mentoring, training and grants, and a neutral space away from the local authority that would be clean and professional where they could bring new businesses and try to sell to their new customers.

Fourth, we must develop the all-Ireland economy. It must be noted that in this 124-page document seven lines were given to that idea. Right now we have IDA Ireland, Enterprise Ireland, Invest NI and a plethora of embassies around the world that duplicate their roles. If they were rationalised and focused on the growing economies such as those of the BRIC countries there would be extra funds available which could be harvested to increase the output of these organisations. There is no effort to bring Invest NI, the IDA and Enterprise Ireland and the expensive embassy infrastructure into alignment.

How many jobs has the embassy in South Africa created in the past year, or the consulate in New York? How many jobs have each of the 76 embassies around the planet created? Has there even been a cost benefit analysis? If one asked a small Irish business which used an office abroad for its exports how much profit that office was making the answer would be on the tip of its tongue. Unfortunately, I very much doubt it is on the tip of the Minister's tongue.

We welcome that the Taoiseach has taken responsibility in this regard even though he and his Ministers remain somewhat confused as to the exact number of jobs, gross and net, they expect to take out of this plan. The Taoiseach is now on the hook with the responsibility of job creation in this State. It is a heavy responsibility and one that Sinn Féin will not allow him to shirk.

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