Shane Ross (Dublin South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Some of us on these benches are becoming veterans of the kind of sanitised speeches which the Taoiseach brings in here and reads every time before he goes to one of these meetings in Europe. This is, unfortunately, no exception. Like many other Deputies, including Deputy Boyd Barrett, I expected the Taoiseach to come in here and say that top of the agenda - I am insisting on it going on the agenda this evening and tomorrow - is the refusal of the ECB to come before the banking inquiry. That was an extraordinary decision from Europe yesterday and it summarised the attitude of the ECB and many European leaders to Ireland and, in many cases though not in this one, the attitude of the European Commission to Ireland. It is totally unacceptable that an inquiry of this sort should be rendered almost totally useless and redundant by the fact that those who are supposed to be our friends have torpedoed it by refusing to appear or to give it any sense of meaning. The ECB has proved that it is no friend of Ireland, that it is arrogant and that it does not really care about the banking inquiry or the origins of the banking inquiry now that it has got its pound of flesh from the Irish people. That is the reality. It also indicates the attitude of many European powers to Ireland. Page five of the Taoiseach's speech states that:

As Deputies will be aware, the Commission's opinions on member states' draft budgetary plans were also published recently. Ireland was one of five member states found to be fully compliant with the provisions of the Stability and Growth Pact, along with Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Slovakia. This is a real vote of confidence in our management of our public finances.

Does that mean that 20-odd nations do not give a hoot about the requirements of the Stability and Growth Pact? Does that mean that Ireland is patting itself on the back by being up there with the big boys and behaving as though it is a prosperous nation at a great cost to the people of this country? I do not want to be up there with Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Slovakia - not with the current state of the economy. We cannot afford to be there. How is it that France and other countries can give two fingers to the ECB and the European Commission in respect of keeping to the Stability and Growth Pact while Ireland seems forced to bow and scrape and seems to take pride in doing so and in taking such a craven attitude to European requirements? This, unfortunately, is what is happening.

The Taoiseach went on to say proudly and probably wrongly that we are the fastest growing economy in Europe. I do not think it is true but I do not expect the Minister of State to take any other attitude. Do the Taoiseach and the Minister of State know about contract manufacturing? Do they know what it means? Do they know how these growth figures are actually added up and what they come to? The Taoiseach, the Minister of State and the Government have decided to ignore the warnings of the Government's own fiscal advisory council recently when it pointed out that many of the exports which are responsible for growth, and it said it did not know how much so the Minister of State does not know either, are accounted for by what is called contract manufacturing. This is a totally artificial system of booking exports from one country to another and nothing at all happens in Ireland except there is a booking.

The Irish Fiscal Advisory Council warned that it did not know how much this accounted for in our growth figures but it estimated that it might be about 2.5%. If one takes 2.5% away from the figure of 4.7% this year, one is back at 2.2%. If one takes 2.5% away from the figure of 3.9% next year, one is back at 1.4%. That will make us an awful lot less smug about our growth figures. To parade those figures around here either without the knowledge that they are bogus, and they are certainly massaged, or pretending that they are real is completely dishonest. Let this be a serious warning to the Government about these growth figures. If it is pretending that the next budget can be based on figures of this kind, which are so inflated by something that is unknown and which it does not acknowledge, it is doing something that is particularly wrong. It is also cooking the books and I suspect that cooking the books is not something its European masters will approve of.

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