Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Minister has talked about the importance of improving productivity. If he says job creation is his No. 1 goal, his productivity is poor, with a rate of 100 part-time jobs a month.

On the question of priorities, a total of €64 billion has been piled into the banks in recent years. In sharp contrast, the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation is operating on a reduced budget and capital investment budgets are cut, year on year. The SME sector cannot access funding from the banks. The recent ISME survey found that more than half of the applications for funding had been refused. For Sinn Féin and everyone else outside of the Government parties, the only measure of the success of Government policy is the creation of jobs. A total of 80% of all the jobs in the State are created in small and medium enterprises in the domestic economy. That is the real economy, the ignored economy. Sinn Féin's policies are designed to fix the real economy. The country is blighted with infrastructural inadequacies.

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