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

Regarding political reform, because of the scheduling of this debate over the next three days, the Sinn Féin spokesperson on arts, heritage and the Gaeltacht will not have an opportunity to question the Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht for another five weeks. In the month when the Irish language movement found its voice with 10,000 people on the streets to support it, I, as Sinn Féin spokesperson for the Irish language, will only get to put one question to the relevant Minister in eight weeks, an incredible period.

The programme for Government promised a revolution, a political whirlwind and spoke of unprecedented national resolve. The Fine Gael-Labour election campaign in 2011 was festooned with promises of jobs and employment creation. For the most part, these have just been empty rhetoric, Pat Rabbitte style promises. In the past three years, there has been no sense of urgency that one would expect in the jaws of a severe economic crisis. We have had a plethora of dubious schemes introduced. If these are added to the numbers of those who have emigrated, the likelihood is that 20% of the State would now be unemployed. We have 80,000 people quitting the State every year for the past three years, up to 250,000 citizens in total who have emigrated. Tens of thousands of families have been uprooted from Ireland and forced abroad to face an uncertain future. It means thousands of communities having the most energetic and innovative generation deleted from their midsts.

The Government will be known to these families as the emigration Government. Since it came to power, unemployment has crept down from 14.6% to 12.3% but there is no doubt emigration played the largest part in that. A rate of 12.3% is a long way off from a rate of 4.5%. The figures do not tell the full story. In Nordic countries, 25% of the working age population is not working. In this State, six years ago, 31% of the working age population was not working. Now that figure is 42% but it is not recorded in the Government’s figures. In 2011, the Minister for Social Protection, Deputy Burton, stated, when launching Pathways to Work, “no one who loses his or her job should be allowed to drift, with no support, into long-term unemployment”. Three years later, the proportion of those aged between 20 and 24 not in employment, education or further training is more than a quarter, the highest of all EU member states other than Greece and over twice the average level of OECD member states. Almost half of those aged under 25 are already more than 12 months unemployed. The anaemic response to this is a watery youth guarantee that has not got the necessary investment. Long-term unemployment, with all the social ills associated with it, has ballooned over the past three years and is above the rate of all OECD countries, bar Greece.

One of my major gripes is that the indigenous small and medium-sized manufacturing and services sectors which trade internationally have been ignored by the State. So much effort has gone into attracting foreign direct investment, which is important and welcome. However, it cannot be to the cost of indigenous companies. Some of the elements in the programme for Government that would have helped those indigenous businesses, such as tackling upward only rents, were forgotten about as soon as the rear ends of the new Fine Gael and Labour Ministers touched the leather on their new ministerial seats. They acquiesced to the wishes of the vested interests, namely large landlords, many of them shown to have been investors in the Government’s election campaign.

The programme for Government promised to fix the desert in credit availability facing small businesses. A major element to this was to ensure the banks were oriented into delivering credit to small businesses. This never happened, however, because Fine Gael and Labour never exerted the necessary influence to make it happen. As a result, we have seen an ecosystem of State-backed credit providers which do everything but provide credit. The microfinance start-up fund has €100 million in place but only has had €2 million drawn down. The programme for Government promised to deliver balanced economic policy. The first Action Plan for Jobs in 2011 contained a proviso that 50% of foreign direct investment had to go into regions outside of Dublin and Cork. Under this Government, there has been a collapse in foreign direct investment outside of Dublin and Cork. In 2011, it was at 27% and it was dropped from the next action plan. In 2012, it fell to 23% and it is still falling. If you live outside of the M50, the Government has not got you on its radar.

The programme for Government promised sustainable and inclusive growth with a taxation policy that would ensure developments in the building industry would be sustainable.

Over the past few months, however, we have seen unsustainable localised property bubbles, which are pushing out families. Speculators are elbowing them out of their way again and badly needed funds for enterprise are being sucked into these bubbles locally to the detriment of productive sectors of society. The programme for Government referred to tackling poverty and preventing attacks on the most vulnerable, but the Labour Party voted for and oversaw the destruction of the Sunday premium, which supported hundreds of thousands of low and middle-income earners, many of whom were women. The party ended it but they depended on it.

Reform of VAT for exporting service companies was promised, but that disappeared, while the promise to help indigenous suppliers to tackle the issue of "hello money" has been forgotten. The Government's policy has worsened the experience of small businesses trying to tender for State contracts. Ireland currently is a poster boy for all the wrong reasons. A larger proportion of such tenders are won by firms outside the State than in any other European state because the Government is tendering such large contracts that small domestic enterprises cannot tender for them.

We have an urgent crisis but there has not been an urgent response to it. The programme for Government and the austerity treaty were headlined with promises of investment. We were told that the land of stimulus and investment was around the corner and all we needed to do was to trust the Government parties and they would take us there, but there has been no urgency, investment or stimulus. Any stimulus that has been announced has been matched with cuts in the capital investment programme over the past number of years, negating any opportunity for it to bring benefits.

The strategic investment bank has mutated into the Strategic Investment Fund, which has all the urgency of a sleepy tortoise. One of the Government's major jobs initiatives related to energy efficiency. It said 1 million homes would be insulated by 2020, but that target has disappeared, as has the investment that was to be put into the scheme and the jobs that would have been created.

There are ways to create jobs other than by reducing people's pay and conditions. Energy charges and rents for businesses and the costs of the interaction between business and the State could be reduced, while commercial rates that reflect the profitability of a business could be introduced. The Government could also develop investment commensurate with the level of urgency needed. Our party has identified the source of those funds. We urge the Minister to use his remaining time in office to implement some of these measures.

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