Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Taoiseach for his reply. I am concerned that if we do not look at investing a chunk of the amount by which it looks like we are going to exceed the troika target, we will follow the path of Japan, which had a huge economic collapse and a huge property collapse. It followed a very conservative route of paying down household debt and gradually closing the deficit. It did some of what needed to be done, but without the economic stimulus.

Japan stagnated for about 20 years. It is climbing out of it now but it stagnated for a very long time. My fear is that, based on our current trajectory of incremental improvement, which is obviously to be welcomed, we will still stagnate and the long-term unemployment rate will be several percentage points higher than it needs to be. In fairness to the Government and the previous Government, it has been shown categorically to investors and the markets over recent budgets that Ireland is capable of turning this around. I appreciate that the numbers are still moving, which makes it very difficult for us all, but does the Taoiseach agree that the figure presented by the Government in April to the European Commission, which is the only figure we can go on, exceeded the minimum troika requirement by €1.4 billion and, therefore, we can hope this presents the Government with a chance to still exceed the target and engage in serious economic stimulus around household debt and entrepreneurship for 2014?

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