Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

When the Deputy says what the Government is doing is not clear, I ask him whether it is not clear to JP Morgan which announced this week that it was buying an office block in Dublin in advance of moving hundreds of jobs to the city.

Is it not clear perhaps to the insurance companies that have approached the Central Bank of Ireland indicating strong interest in locating new activities and, more important, jobs in our country? Is it not clear perhaps to those companies that were on the front page of The New York Timesearlier this week explicitly naming Dublin among the places to which they are looking to move further business? I note with interest the Deputy's bare reference to the Good Friday Agreement. He made it appear inevitable that its political status will be recognised when, of course, his party and his party leader for months were pointing to the necessity of that happening. Now that the Government has secured this recognition, this is dismissed by him.

I acknowledge, however, that if the response to the huge Brexit challenge is a response from Dublin, then this is not a national response. This is the reason that the Government is committed to strengthening our national capital investment and that the Minister for Finance and I are travelling to Luxembourg next week to engage with the European Investment Bank to examine what the options are for strengthening investment beyond the additional €2 billion we have signalled we will invest in our hospitals, schools and transport network to respond to the Brexit challenge.

The Deputy made reference to challenges in the agriculture sector, which have been strongly recognised by the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine and the rest of the Government, but, of course, he made no reference to the fact that the Minister, through last year's budget, put in place a fund of €150 million to help the food sector respond to the income volatility we have acknowledged will be exacerbated by Brexit. The Deputy made reference to tourism but no reference to the fact that the Government retained the lower VAT rate of 9% for the sector and the fact that over the past number of months and, indeed, year, access to the country has increased through airports with new routes to Ireland, all in recognition of the challenge that Brexit will create.

The only bit on which I agree with the Deputy is that we are all united in recognising the scale of the Brexit challenge for our country and we all acknowledge we must explore all options open to the Government to respond, but I do not accept the Deputy's contention, which is not borne out by the facts that I have laid out, that the Government's actions to date have not recognised the scale of the challenge. They clearly have, and this is recognised by many parts of the economy.

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