Dara Murphy (Cork North Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I wish to share time so I had better get going. It gives me pleasure to speak on this motion. I am chairman of the Fine Gael internal committee on European affairs and have the pleasure of sitting in the Chamber when the Taoiseach speaks before and after European Council meetings. I was here last week before the deal became apparent. I heard some of the language from the Opposition parties, such as terms like "catastrophic", "disaster" and "negligence". Today when the Taoiseach was in the House, there was scant reference to the promissory note deal. It shows that they very much underestimated the abilities of our negotiating teams - the Taoiseach, the Minister for Finance, the Minister of State with responsibility for European Affairs and the civil servants.

One of the arguments still being put forward, particularly by Sinn Féin and Deputy Donnelly, is that if we had sought or even received a write-down of debt, we would be better off. If we had received a write-down of debt and our interest rate had remained unchanged, even a write-down of 33% would not have been as good from a cashflow perspective and indeed a total debt perspective than the deal we secured. Public and media commentators are right to point out that a large body of work remains to be done, particularly with regard to the other legacy banking debt and our ambition to restore strong employment. The strategy adopted by this Government is the one that must be continued.

The first element of that was to restore our international reputation. That was done after 14 years of slowly chipping away at that reputation by virtue in recent years of non-attendance at meetings. Any time I have been in Brussels, it is remarkable to meet civil servants, particularly Irish civil servants, who work within the European Parliament and Commission and repeatedly point out that it was soul-destroying for them to be part of a nation whose government did not attend and did not represent the views of its people adequately.

In order to do any new deal, one must prove and establish that one can abide by the terms of the new deal. The job done by the Irish people and led by this Government in showing that we could achieve targets facilitated the belief among our European partners, and partners they are, that we could abide by the new terms. Very difficult measures still need to be taken. One of the difficult things to explain to people is that we will not now have to make some cuts and increase some taxes but there will still be cuts and taxes as we move to the point where we remove the deficit of €11 billion that we have over the current number of years. It is analogous to the great work in road traffic improvements through reducing drink driving limits. The families of people who have not been killed as we reduce the numbers of deaths on our roads will never know they have been spared a great tragedy. Similarly, there are tax increases and cuts that will not happen. The key element is that the confidence we need to make growth the heavy lifter over the next number of years will follow on from the confidence that is coming internationally from securing this excellent deal for our country.

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