Michael D'Arcy (Wexford, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

-----one gets to the high rate of tax, the marginal rate of 52%, when ones earns €33,800. To put that in context, the average industrial wage is €36,000. This is one of the very few jurisdictions in which one is able to get to 52%, the higher rate of tax, before getting to the average industrial wage.

On the national debt, some of the things that were said earlier are incredible. The national debt is approximately €200 billion. When I entered this House a decade ago - at the same time as Deputy Calleary - it was between €44 billion and €47 billion. That was the debt. Some €30 billion was added because of what happened with the banks. The remainder relates to running the deficit that we are talking about in order to ensure that people would have social protection payments, old age pensions, children's allowance and unemployment benefits and allowances. The national debt has increased by approximately €140 billion - €14 billion a year for ten years - to ensure that people had those payments. That is what has happened and that is why it was done.

I want to touch on a matter to which Deputy Boyd Barrett referred, namely, gross profits. Nobody pays tax on gross profits. People pay tax on net profits. That was a dishonest thing to say regarding gross profits. Without those companies employing people, there would be hundreds of thousands fewer people in the workplace. These people are the reason we have got out of the recession. We have emerged from the downturn in which we found ourselves. It was not a Greek-style downturn, but there would be problems if we had gone down the route that some parties on the left suggested. Deputy Boyd Barrett spoke on local radio with me, going back to the period of the fiscal referendum, and said that defaulting was the way to do it and that it had worked out really well in other countries. Anybody who knows about a country that has defaulted knows that it has not worked out well.

I want to touch on what Deputy Pearse Doherty of Sinn Féin said. His party leader, Deputy Adams, sat in the seat that Deputy Pearse Doherty sat in earlier and stated that defaulting was the way forward. I want to make a point about Sinn Féin. Sinn Féin has never taken a risk in the politics of the Republic of Ireland because it has always determined that it would not go into government. One might criticise Fianna Fáil or Labour or ourselves, but at least we have stepped into government and done what we believe to be the right thing in order to get the country to the right space. It has taken a decade. I have spoken about it before - it is the lost decade. We are going to balance our budget in 2018. We are obliged to do so on foot of the fiscal rules. These are not the European rules that were created by somebody else, but the rules that we voted on in the 2012 fiscal compact referendum that was passed by the people of this country.

There are many other areas I could cover. I think the summer economic statement - or spring economic statement - is good. The old days of one big-bang-wallop of a budget coming and nobody knowing what was going on until budget day have gone. Things are improving and I look forward to the opportunity for the other parties to have their budgets costed.

I want to finish on this. Some people are expressing the view that it is all wrong. It is not all wrong. It is not all right either, and I accept that, but we should not go down the route of saying that everything is wrong with the public sector. It is not. We have the very best public servants and civil servants. We do not have the greatest health service - there are issues there to be resolved, which we are doing the best we can about with the resources that are available.

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