Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I am talking about the unemployment figures. As the Minister knows, much of that work is part-time, replacing jobs that in many cases had been full-time ones. It includes people going on education and training programmes, which I welcome. Are there real jobs for the hundreds of thousands out there, jobs that will generate economic growth and so on?

At the beginning of this year there were the small signs of economic growth and recovery to which the Minister pointed but these have completely evaporated and we are back in recession territory. The European economy is in increasing trouble as austerity of the kind that was applied here is applied throughout the rest of Europe. It is not working.

In conclusion I point at the two big elephants in the room. The servicing of our debt is costing us €8 billion this year. The Minister says his primary goal is to deal with the deficit. Will he not acknowledge the big problem? At the end of this year, although we will have a primary budget surplus we will still have a huge deficit because of interest on debt which is largely not ours. Then there is the fiscal treaty. The Minister says we are towards the end of the austerity path. Why does he not admit that afterwards we must reduce the deficit further by subscribing to the terms of the fiscal treaty? That means years more of austerity.

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