Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The new two-pack initiative will ensure that the Commission will see our budget. That was recently agreed.

I asked the Taoiseach a question earlier to which he did not reply. It relates to the ECB, which is currently earning over €500 million per year in profits from its holdings of Irish bonds. Last year, the ECB agreed to return all profits on Greek bonds to Athens. Ireland and other countries forced out of the market, essentially by EU policies, have a clear right to be treated in the same way as Greece. It has been confirmed that Ireland has not formally asked for this money to be returned to Dublin. Will the Taoiseach change his policy and formally request that this €500 million be returned to Ireland?

The second issue is jobs. The European Union is not doing enough on the scale required on the jobs issue. The EU budget has been cut for the first time ever. It is completely counterintuitive and is going in the opposite direction to the United States. There has been quantitative easing in the United States and it has a very assertive central bank, which has responded to the worst crisis across the globe since 1929. The approach in the US has been different. The US is not out of the woods but it has had two substantial stimulus packages and its central bank is behaving far differently from the European Central Bank in its response to the crisis, although I accept things have improved under Mario Draghi. With regard to jobs, nobody can say convincingly that Europe is treating the jobs crisis with the urgency it requires. It has reduced its overall budget and is reallocating from the same envelope, all because the payer countries are determined that the budget should be continually reduced. In fact, the influence of David Cameron over the budget negotiations was quite significant, and he got his way to a significant degree in respect of his agenda for cutting the budget. What is the Taoiseach's response?

See this speech in context