Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I honestly say that the Taoiseach has exceeded all expectations. I can say that with some justification, as I have previously been one of his critics. He has been immensely strong at a time when we needed someone to step up, make hard decisions and understand people. There is no one better than the Taoiseach at understanding people, be they the women of the Magdalen laundries or the homeless on our streets. He is willing to go out and talk to them. He does not hide away. He is not out of touch. He has that humanity, but he also has an understanding of the considerable task that we faced as a country three years ago. It was an extraordinary time. It is easy to forget that 300,000 jobs had been wiped out. Some 20% of private sector jobs disappeared overnight. We were on the hook for €64 billion and were spending 50% more than we were taking in in revenue.

Parties opposite state that they are anti-austerity. Everyone is anti-austerity, but policies based on spending one's way out of trouble when one is already spending 50% more than one is accruing in revenue are madness. Those were the strategies being offered by the benches opposite. They continued in that vein. Year after year, Sinn Féin has stated that it would make 80% of the adjustment on the tax side. This would have meant the extraction of €5 billion more in taxes from our people and businesses during the past four years. We would not have had an economy in recovery.

Instead, the Taoiseach understood that we could not build over the old fault lines of the property culture left by Fianna Fáil. We needed to create entirely new sectors. He has driven the hunger to find those sectors and to build a strong economy on a sustainable basis. Not only have we created 80,000 jobs, which the rhetoric of those opposite completely denies, but they are located in every region. Some 94% of these are full-time jobs in sustainable sectors, not part-time, yellow pack jobs. We will create more. These jobs are fixing people's lives. This is not just about statistics. It is about people who can get up in the morning with a purpose and the ability to fulfil their potential. They can provide incomes for themselves and their loved ones. They can also provide money to help us as a Government to address some of the issues on our streets. We see them all of the time. Homelessness is the issue of today, but there are many others in the health sector that we need to be able to fix.

Remarkably, the recent budget, which was slated by the troika for not taking a further €2 billion out of our economy through taxes and spending cuts, saw us restoring €1 billion thanks to our progress. It is not a lot and people's patience is strained to breaking point at times, but it points to the direction in which the country is going. We can realistically have confidence in the vision that the Taoiseach so often articulates about wanting a country in which people can live and grow old in dignity and our young people have a future. We are creating that. When we entered office, net emigration was 34,000 people. That rate has decreased by 30%, but we are nowhere near where we need to be. We want the elimination of net emigration. We want any young person who wants to make his or her future in Ireland to have that opportunity.

When I listen to the parties opposite, I never hear a word about the importance of enterprise. The truth is that it is enterprise that will create employment. There is no Sinn Féin policy on enterprise. There is no Independent policy on enterprise. They believe that it just grows on trees, that they can load more taxes on employers and workers and do not have to create an environment that is good for start-ups but that it will all still happen anyway. They do not believe that they have to create an environment in which external investors, who once fled the country in their droves, are willing to invest money. One must work at these factors day in, day out. That is what the Taoiseach has driven in our economy. His enthusiasm and commitment have rallied people to find the energy to drive change. It is remarkable.

I am a long time in politics and have seen many glossy statements of intent being published by Ministers in a blaze of glory, only to see them shrink away when things fail. Under the Taoiseach's guidance, everyone is held to account for delivering on commitments. That is at the heart of our Action Plan for Jobs, Pathways to Work and every one of our strategies. Accountability represents a major change. The Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Howlin, is driving real change in our public service. We can be confident that we will not only have more resources, but that we will have a public service that has the ability to be performance driven. This is a fantastic achievement of the Government. It is what we will need in the coming five years as we continue to grapple with high levels of unemployment and create enterprise in new areas that are as yet undreamt of. We need the sort of Government that the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste have been offering. I am proud to be a part of that and to vote and speak in support of it.

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