Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

In recent years the previous Government trumpeted what it saw as its success in creating jobs and stimulating economic growth. The Government is continuing to do this. There is no doubt that jobs have been created and that economic growth has occurred but is the jobs and growth strategy, as the title of this debate suggests, sustainable at all levels? Is it sustainable in the sense that it could be vulnerable to significant changes, external or internal, that could allow the jobs and growth to dissolve overnight, as they did during the Celtic tiger period because of a massive over-reliance on particular sectors and an enormous over-dependence on the whims and profitability of the market? Is it sustainable in the sense that the jobs contribute to a better standard of living for those who are working and for society as a whole or are they jobs that exacerbate social divisions, poverty, stress, mental health issues and make people's quality of life worse rather than better? Will the strategy for jobs and growth help the indigenous small and medium enterprise sector or will it damage it? It is quite possible to create jobs that have these adverse effects, damaging other sectors of the economy and worsening the quality of life for people.

Job creation and growth can also be completely environmentally unsustainable in the sense that they run counter to the environmental objectives which we have no choice but to meet because of the possibility of runaway climate change and the very severe dangers and economic costs it is causing and could cause in the future. Those are the indices against which we have to measure the sustainability of the current jobs strategy or any jobs strategy. In that regard, the jobs and growth strategy of the previous Government in the past five years and of the current Government, in so far as it continues to articulate that strategy, is not sustainable.

When I hear about record growth rates, I shiver. Anybody who does not have the memory of a goldfish should shiver. That is what we heard for five or six years prior to the biggest economic crash in the history of the State. We were told we would have a soft landing and that the fundamentals of the economy were strong. However, there were some people - we were mostly on the left and considered to be complete contrarians, fringe politicians and so on who did not understand economics - who, strangely, were the only ones who said the level of growth at the time was unsustainable when the mainstream members of the political establishment who apparently know about economics were saying it would be fine. The crash came and it was proved who was right. Frankly, because there was an over-reliance on a couple of sectors, most notably the housing sector, the members of the political establishment were hostages captured by the people at the top of that industry and the banking industry. There is no doubt about it. This matter is not about the individuals now facing possible jail sentences or, for that matter, those who got away with what they did. It was blatantly obvious that the political system had been captured by the bankers and the developers and was nodding at any suggestions the latter made. That led us into a massive crash.

Are we guilty of doing the same thing again? I put it to the Minister that we are because we are doing precisely what was done in the run-up to the previous crash, namely, that there is an over-reliance on essentially two sectors. The first of these is the multinational sector. The Minister should not get me wrong. The multinational sector continues to make a contribution to this economy. However, are we making the companies that operate in the sector pay their taxes or learning from what they do in order to develop the skills base and knowledge to begin to build up our own indigenous industrial capacity? We self-evidently are not doing so. I will raise the issue of drugs and medicine on the Adjournment later today. We have the capacity now to develop our own industry in the area of medicine and drugs, which could save the State and the health service in particular an enormous amount of money. We are paying multiples of the price for basic drugs from the multinational companies to which I refer at huge cost to our citizens and our health service. However, there has been no attempt to build up our indigenous capacity within the State to do it on a not-for-profit basis to the benefit of the entire economy, with the effect of creating sustainable jobs in the long term.

Incredibly, we are again seeing an over-reliance on a market which is failing badly in the area of providing housing. It is extraordinary that for the past five years we have essentially been praying that those in the market would eventually get around to building houses. They will not because they do not consider it profitable enough to do so. I then hear from the Government and, disappointingly, Fianna Fáil the mantra that the Government does not create jobs. Sorry, but what are the jobs in the health service? Are they Government jobs? I believe they are. Who created the jobs in local authorities for those who used to build local authority housing? Unless I am mistaken, I believe it was the State that created them. That was done in a range of other areas, including that of forestry. We are massively underperforming in the latter - an area in which we could excel, particularly as Ireland has the best conditions for growing trees in Europe. While the latter may be the case, this country has the lowest level of forest cover anywhere in Europe. It is quite extraordinary.

As a motion I put to the Dáil a few years ago explained, the Irish Forestry and Forest Products Association, IFFPA, indicates that 490 jobs can be created for every 15,000 ha of forest planted. Currently, we have 12,000 people working directly in the forestry sector and 11% forest coverage. If we got to 22%, we would create a further 5,000 direct jobs as well as all the spin-off industry. If we reached the 30% target to which we signed up, we would create 8,000 to 10,000 sustainable jobs in a growth area. It is also an environmentally sustainable area and less vulnerable to the whims of the international market. However, we do not do it because of the complete over-reliance on the private market and EU rules which prevent Coillte, the State forestry company which was established to increase forest coverage, from planting trees and creating the jobs that would be so environmentally and otherwise beneficial to rural Ireland, which is in serious trouble. That planting would generate a series of knock-on industries and would be environmentally very positive in terms of meeting our climate change objectives.

The arts is another area in respect of which the State absolutely has a job creation role. People pay lip service to the arts, but we have the lowest levels of public expenditure on the arts anywhere in Europe. This is extraordinary for a country whose international reputation depends largely on how we have excelled in the arts. In our pre-budget submission, we were the only party - notwithstanding the lip service paid by everyone else - to argue that we should get up to the 0.6% expenditure level for public investment in the arts and create a scheme of public employment for artists to work in communities, directly in the arts, in health, education and all sorts of areas. We could create real, sustainable jobs that would contribute socially and economically and would be sustainable economically over the long term. There are many more examples.

We are massively over-reliant still on the market principles and multinationals that led us into trouble in the first instance. We must move away from the ideological aversion to public industry, which has served us well at various times historically. Why the Government wants to move away from and abandon it escapes me. It can only be because of ideological blindness.

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