Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for his support for the country in the context of the Government holding the Presidency of the European Union. Ireland will not have the opportunity to hold the Presidency again until 2026 or 2027, so there has been a focus from Europe on an effective Presidency by Ireland.

The Government has prepared well for this. We have had a good start with the Commission, the European Parliament, the Council and through personal engagement by 14 Ministers this week with the committees of the European Parliament across a range of issues. From that point of view the conclusion of a multi-annual framework or budget for the European Union from 2014 to 2020 will be an important element of this Presidency, and the Presidency is very much lined up with the President of the EU Council, Herman von Rompuy, in that regard. Assuming that he decides it will be opportune to hold a meeting in February to conclude on a figure for the budget for 2014 to 2020, that will not be the end of the game. Under the Lisbon treaty the European Parliament must give its consent and approval for any such budget and the Presidency, held by Ireland, will have to deal with the Parliament in respect of getting that through.

That leads on to the capacity to deal with the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy and up to 70 legislative measures, or files as they are called in Europe, to be dealt with by the Parliament. The European elections take place next year and this will be the last Presidency before the electoral process at European level begins to focus on those elections. In that sense, the Deputy can take it that the Government will work very hard on its responsibilities for dealing with these matters.

With regard to the Economic Management Council, the Deputy will be aware that the ceilings for spending have been set for the next number of years. We have set out the strategy for what we must do to get our deficit below 3% by 2015. On the run up to the budget this year, these matters are always, and have always been, subject to the usual cynical comment that things are leaking from Cabinet or from individual meetings and so forth.

The more people around the table - 30 or 40 officials from different Departments - the more things are likely to get scattered. The Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform sat down with individual Ministers and had bilateral meetings about their spending ceilings and proposals to make reductions in their budgets for 2013. By and large, that was dealt with successfully. The Economic Management Council had to deal with a number of issues and did that to the extent that we were able to conclude the budget for 2013 with a hell of a lot less of the speculation, allegation and rumour that had floated around during the preparation of the 2012 budget. Under the European semester, the budget may be earlier this year. The date is not fixed yet but it could be a number of weeks earlier than last year's budget announcement because we are required to be more open about these things. We do not object to that but the final decisions are obviously a matter for Government.

On the jobs question, I specifically called a meeting last week to deal with the issue of jobs and employment. The reason I did is normal Cabinet meetings cover 20 to 25 items, including reports, international material and so on. The Deputy is aware of this and in the course of any normal meeting, there are opportunities and potential for job creation but I thought this would be important given the fact that a change of attitude is clearly beginning to happen here. Over the past three days, some people in the media were more than surprised to find the extent of positive news emanating from decisions that are being made, which are a reflection of interest in the country. That is in everybody's interest in terms of confidence. I felt it appropriate to ask every Minister to prepare a specific memorandum relevant to his or her own Department dealing with short term, medium term and longer term opportunities for employment because the problem here and in other countries was that when a recession ended, it normally took a decade for that to filter down to the ground to the average citizen in terms of their understanding that it was over and, therefore, that opportunities presented themselves. I want to short-circuit that. In essence, we are injecting the capacity to grow the economy and, on top of that, to make decisions at political level that can impact on job creation in the short term. Clearly, there is serious potential for jobs in the energy, communications, marine, agriculture and construction sectors.

This leads me to the reason I did that. I hope to have regular, or, as appropriate, Cabinet meetings focused on employment and job creation where I can follow through on the targets and objectives set by each Minister as they affect the Deputy's constituency and the country as a whole and that will be positive. When I look at the live register, I am not happy with the level of unemployment, though I noticed in the CSO figures a revolving number of approximately 36,000 every month in 2012 where people signed off and others signed back on. Nobody wants people out of work, yet during the three years prior to the Government's election in 2011, some 250,000 jobs were lost in the private sector. I am glad to report that over the past 12 to 18 months, between 12,000 and 20,000 new jobs were created in the private sector, which is a positive trend. The JobBridge scheme is a private sector initiative and it was intended to create 5,000 positions but more than 13,000 have been filled to date and it has been well accepted internationally as a model for the kind of thing we should do. I said previously that, on the way back from Bucharest recently, I called to see the Austrian chancellor who is preparing for the next European Presidency. Austria's level of youth unemployment is approximately 3% whereas it is 29% here, which is much too high. We have lessons to learn from other countries about how they deliver on opportunities for young people, in particular, to get into training, new careers and so on.

From a point where our reputation was in shreds and we had no capacity to enter any market, I am glad to see that interest rates have fallen from more than 14% to approximately 3.5%. I am glad to see the sale of Bank of Ireland paper recently for €1 billion, which is more money back for the taxpayer. That is important but it is only a beginning and, obviously, we have a long way to go. The continuing negotiations at European level in respect of the ECB, Eurogroup and ECOFIN are of critical importance to us to exit the programme successfully.

The Deputy referred to reform and transforming government. We have made a number of decisions, including the establishment of the HR shared services centre for the Civil Service, PeoplePoint, which will reduce head count by 17% and costs by more than 25%. Last June, the Government agreed to implement the mandatory use of framework agreements for commonly produced goods and services, which is expected to yield between €30 million and €40 million in savings across the public service annually. Last September, we agreed to set up the national procurement office, which would produce savings of up to €600 million if it is handled properly, and the Minister of State at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Brian Hayes, is dealing with that. We announced the radical reform of local government, which will be the biggest in 100 years, to save the taxpayer more than €430 million by replacing 114 local authorities with 31 integrated authorities and reducing the number of members from 1,627 to 950. I appointed the fiscal council independently to give its view on the country. The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform publishes online purchase orders for the procurement of goods and services worth more than €20,000 as a first step in extending that process to all Departments. We still have a long way to. We amended the Freedom of Information Acts to give greater transparency and we passed legislation to overhaul political donations. We also passed criminal justice legislation to tackle white collar crime and so on.

Clearly, our focus has to be on increasing our competitiveness, putting the structures in place to sort our problems with our public finances and changing the way business is done, for instance, in the health sector and through strong labour market activation measures within the Department of Social Protection such as JobBridge, the new Intreo service which is linked to the Department of Education and Skills and which published the SOLAS Bill earlier, to address training and opportunities for young people. We are at the two-year mark in this Administration and, for me, restructuring public services and the public finances and a relentless drive to create opportunities for jobs and improve access to credit for small and medium enterprises will grow indigenous confidence, which is what we need to get back.

When people ask whether we can return to where we were, I say we should not go back because in the 2000s, we had a system built on debt, property and recklessness. We need to be competitive through investment and innovation, which is the position we were in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when we were creating 1,000 jobs a week. We have a long way to go to get to that but we are headed in the right direction. These are a few pointers that have us heading in that direction and we intend to keep on with this plan in terms of sorting everything out.

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