Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein)

We have seen four years of family and community-breaking austerity, a contracting economy, stagnant demand, forced emigration, sky high unemployment and reducing tax receipts. One would imagine that serious consideration would be given to a change in policy. Evidently not. Instead, the new Government already faces a contracting economy, which makes a fantasy of the budgetary projections made just three months ago. One would imagine that someone on the Government side would cop on and change approach, but, alarmingly, no. By all accounts from Germany, the Government looks likely to implement a mini-budget that will force more poisonous medicine on the ailing patient.

In such an environment, the Government should be enthusiastically searching for alternative opportunities to grow the economy and trying to observe international trends and best practice. Here are the trends. Two thirds of emerging market companies that made it onto the Fortune 500 list last year are state-owned and most of the rest enjoy some level of state input.

State companies include some of the world's largest companies, creating profits throughout the world. It is not a case of private versus the centrally planned of old. New State companies are good at learning from the market to ensure that they can be successful and profitable. State companies can access funds that are currently unavailable to many Irish companies. They can invest in pivotally important infrastructure such as broadband whereas equivalent Irish companies cannot. During the early years of this State, the Government created a large number of State companies because the equivalent private capital did not exist. Contrast that situation with the current one.

Contrast also the State's approach to indigenous gas generation with that of Norway or Brazil. Both of those countries created state companies and utilised them to search for, extract and sell gas. Those companies went on to become market leaders and reaped a rich harvest for their respective populations. Unfortunately, successive Irish Governments have given away valuable Irish gas to foreign multinationals, imposed little or no royalties and spent millions of euro of taxpayers' money policing protests against those companies.

The same ineptitude will see the Government sell the self-financing ESB, a State company that has paid €1.2 billion in dividends during the past nine years and that contributed €2.2 billion to the economy through purchases from Irish suppliers, taxes, rates, wages and dividends in 2010 alone.

In many ways, the Government is 30 years behind the curve and following an outdated Thatcherite philosophy instead of embracing new developments in the world economy. Unfortunately for Ireland, the true blue Tory Fine Gael Party, emboldened from watching the Oscar winning film "The Iron Lady", has lulled the Labour lap dog into an ideological slumber.

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