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

Let us look at the figures more closely. The Minister says 135,000 jobs have been created, but he takes the base year as 2012. The Government took office in 2011. In that period, supposedly 120,000 jobs have been created. In the same period of time, the number on activation courses has jumped from 50,000 to 80,000. Of the 120,000 is it safe to assume that 30,000 are activation jobs or schemes, in other words not fully waged jobs? That brings the figure down to 90,000 in that period of time. The truth is that, thankfully, there are strong external tail-winds helping this country along at present. Quantative easing, exchange rates, interest rates, oil prices and so forth are all helping this economy. However, the internal competitive advantages which the Government should be putting in place to ensure there is a sustainable economy into the future have not been put in place, unfortunately. The truth is that the singular competitive advantage that this Government seeks is a bargain basement corporation tax.

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