Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I do not agree at all with Deputy Boyd Barrett about this decade of misery. My point was that former President Clinton said that the challenge for Ireland was to short-circuit what has happened in most other places. He said we have the capacity to do this because the big decisions that are made about our programme, exiting the programme, improving our debt sustainability, having cash flow because of the decisions made to extend the maturities of the promissory notes and hopefully, the discussions arising in respect of other loans will give us that breathing space. That is why the Government is focusing on the decisions for investment and changes to structures that will allow for a much more immediate impact on the people whom I and Deputy Boyd Barrett represent who are on the live register, want to be employed and to contribute, and who at the moment, for one reason or another, might not have a great degree of confidence about finding a job. The Minister for Social Protection is changing the structure so that the way in which the Intreo offices deal with people on the live register is fundamentally different from what applied in the past.

As the Deputy is aware the IMF-EU programme was for €85 billion. That is what we inherited two years ago this week. The programme for Government set out very clearly to make decisions to deal with that public financial problem to change the structures for the way in which we make decisions and do business. That €85 billion was made up of €17.5 billion from our own resources, cash reserves in the National Pensions Reserve Fund, NPRF, €22.5 billion from the IMF extended loan facility, €22.5 billion from the European Financial Stabilisation Mechanism, EFSM, €22.5 billion from the European Financial Stability Facility, EFSF, and €17.7 billion in bilateral loans, including €3.8 billion from the United Kingdom, €0.6 billion from Sweden and €0.4 billion from Denmark. It is in our interest to extend the loans from the EFSF and the EFSM because they are borrowed at lower than market rates to give us the capacity to have cash flow to invest in business and therefore create profit for the country and the economy. The EFSF accounts for just under €18 billion of programme funding and to date Ireland has availed of almost €13 billion of that in six tranches with original maturities ranging from 3.1 years to 29 years. That is what the troika will examine in the case of the loans, their rates and the dates of maturity. The EFSM accounts for €22.5 billion of the programme and we have availed of €21.7 billion of that in nine tranches with original maturities ranging from five to 30 years.

While the Deputy might not think it, most of the external funds borrowed were used for the provision of public services such as health and education and social protection and most of the funds that were used to recapitalise the banks have come from the NPRF. What has been borrowed from abroad from those institutional funds was for our people, for education, health, social protection services and wages.

I am sure even Deputy Boyd Barrett would not want that not to have happened.

Some €3.6 billion of the EFSF loans will fall to be repaid within the next three years, with an additional €5 billion of ESM debt maturing. This, along with the existing debt securities, places pressure on the State, through the NTMA, to borrow the money on the debt markets at that time. That is the reason why, in respect of these matters, we are hopeful of further progress. I do not accept the Deputy's assertion that because it happened to others, we are condemned to bobbing along the bottom in a decade of misery. These are challenging times for everyone but it will not get better unless the Government works with colleagues in Europe and makes decisions here in the interests of all our people. The public pay talks are important so that everyone, from the highest to the latest recruit, puts their shoulders to the wheel and makes a contribution. In many cases, the contributions are challenging and difficult to make. It is in the interests of our country and in the interest of the generation behind us to sort that out. The decisions of Government must be as fair as possible across the board. I do not accept the assertion of Deputy Boyd Barrett of being confined to a decade of what he described.

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