Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Deputy is perfectly entitled to have that viewpoint. I think many people would share his viewpoint that we have to have additional proposals and indicators of what might be helpful to what is happening here. It is true to say that to have 26 million people unemployed in the European Union is astonishing and completely unacceptable. I spoke to the Portuguese Prime Minister when in Portugal last week and I also spoke to Prime Minister of Spain. Some 54% of young people are unemployed, there is no capacity for social welfare after two years, 600,000 people in Portugal are in serious difficulties, with 200,000 house repossessions in Spain. These figures spell out the scale of the challenges those countries face. France is facing a challenging time, Italy has a new government and there are problems in Cyprus and Greece. Of all of these countries, serious decisions were made in Ireland to adjust our programme to deal with our circumstances. Clearly, we are not in a position to borrow any more money. We have made the point as a matter of European policy, and I agree with the IMF on this, that countries that can borrow further moneys should borrow further moneys because that would be good for Irish exports, Irish jobs and jobs in general. I agree that we should strongly pursue the mandate for discussions on free trade between the European Union and the US which, we are told, has a capacity for at least 2 million extra jobs and a potential to grow economies by 2% or 3%. The Deputy knows this. When we sat down with the President of the Commission and the President of the Parliament within two hours we at least got movement on dealing with the deficit for 2012-13 and on the structure and timescale for the multi-annual financial framework or the budget for 2014-20, which includes a €6 billion fund for unemployment and serious moneys for cohesion. The budget was reduced by a decision of the European Council leaders but it was not reduced by anything as much as what some countries were proposing.

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