Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The very first line of this statement states that "economic recovery is now firmly established for the future". Yet this stands in direct contradiction to the paper produced by his Department with respect to the exposures related to Brexit. The findings of the Department of Finance’s economic research paper, Brexit: Analysis of Import Exposures in an EU Context, include how Ireland is a substantial outlier among the EU 27 in terms of its import exposure to the UK, at an aggregate level in almost every sector. It also includes Ireland’s goods import exposures to the UK and they are even more pronounced than its export exposures. Food and live animals account for Ireland’s largest share of UK imports, with machinery and transport equipment, chemicals, manufactured goods, miscellaneous manufacturing articles and mineral fuels also significantly exposed. We have many companies in the west that are excellent designers and builders of equipment, much of which is exported to the UK. This compares with the concentration of export exposures in a smaller number of sectors, in particular food, live animals and chemicals.

Across the EU 27, 13 of the top 15 sub-sectors most exposed to imports from the UK are Irish. The high import exposures highlight the potential disruption to Irish supply chains, particularly for the retail, agrifood and pharma-chem sectors. What particularly struck me about this departmental report was the finding that the issue of supply chain disruption is particularly pronounced for small and medium enterprises, SMEs. We all know how vital they are to our economy, especially in rural Ireland. They may not be in blessed St. Paschal's constituency in Dublin but they certainly are down in Tiobraid Árann, in Cork West and in Roscommon where a Deputy claimed today that no job had been created or announced by St. Leo. We have all the saints in this building at the moment.

The SMEs must be protected and we must deal also with customs and procedures for goods travelling from Great Britain or Northern Ireland. The SME sector represented 93% of the 31,000 firms importing goods to Ireland in 2016, or 62% of €45 billion of the total value of imports. That is massive for a small economy by any scale. Unless the Minister is preparing a significant and robust set of measures to protect SMEs then I genuinely fear we are heading into a deeply damaging economic storm. Does he see it? Is he so blinded by his own figures and spin, as Deputy Broughan and others said? That spin machine must have spread contamination around the other Ministers and the Taoiseach.

The following question remains: how on earth does all that square with the very first line of the Minister's economic statement which reads that our economic recovery is now firmly established for the future? Who is he talking to, where is he looking or who is codding him? Is it the same officials in the Department who advised the late Brian Lenihan? Brian Lenihan, God rest him, advised me to vote for the bank guarantee, something I will regret as long as I have a breath in my body. We were conned by them and by the Europeans. Are we meant to believe them now? Questions have been raised about that and about the judgment of these senior mandarins and senior and junior Ministers.

The Minister with one of his hats on expects us to believe our economy is on solid foundations while with his other hat on he informs us of the extremely precarious situation we may experience in terms of Brexit. We might be able to put questions to our guest tomorrow but will we get answers? The total unknown in respect of Brexit is very scary and the Minister is well aware of that but he makes these kinds of pronouncements about our economy being firmly established. It is may be in Dublin but I remind the Minister of State that Dublin is not Ireland and the Minister does not support the Minister of State's constituency of Kilkenny or care about it. Indeed, some of the foundations in Dublin are not so sound either. It is all another bubble that could burst at any time.

It is beyond me how he can square those positions but I suppose when one has saintly inspiration, one can do a lot of things. The summer statement notes, however, that a notably faster than expected economic recovery has boosted the demand for housing, both public and private. We do not have houses for our people so it is easy to boost it. The private developers in my constituency cannot get planning permission and my colleagues say the same thing.

The statement states that to date the supply response has been insufficient to keep pace with demand with adverse economic and social implications. We know that. Our first priority should be to house our citizens. We were crowing earlier about the American immigration policy but we are incarcerating people in our asylum centres, such as the one in Carrick-on-Suir. We have no problem having homeless pregnant women in Dublin. We should look at our own house first before we tell the United States what to do. One of the greatest understatements ever uttered by a Minister has to be that the supply response has been insufficient to keep pace with demand. What supply response? Where are the houses? Where are the new builds? What about the transformation of vacant sites or lots? Where is this mythical supply that the Minister refers to?

The Government would not even do a basic thing like changing the planning conditions to allow people with vacant shops to convert those shops without planning fees and charges at punitive rates. These simple things are not being done. The Minister is dealing in myths. It is in his head because it most certainly does not exist in the real world. I live in the real world and I represent it, and so does the Minister of State, Deputy Phelan. It is all imaginary and figments of the imagination. I hope the Minister will not be asked too many hard questions at the quiz tonight because he will not be able to answer them. If he added two and four, would he get eight? If he added seven and nine, he might get 12. God help us in those rounds. Maybe he is good at geography but he is certainly not good at maths.

As far as the statement about adverse economic and social implications is concerned, is the Minister referring to the 10,000 homeless, more than 3,000 of whom are children? What about those children considering that we were lecturing about the children in America and what they are doing to them? We will not look after our own children. Mol an óige agus tiocfaidh sí. We just condemn the young here. Is he referring to the catastrophic impact the lack of housing is having on marriages and family breakdown? Is he referring to the blood-thirsty actions of the foreign vulture funds and a court system that seems unwilling and unable to offer adequate protections, and we had Ed Honohan in here again today trying to progress his Bill and all he got were rejections? If it is, then why does he not say so instead of hiding behind the bureaucratic language?

I wonder if the Minister took the time to read Social Justice Ireland's analysis of budget 2019. It suggested that the Government should empower local authorities to collect a new site value tax on underdeveloped land, such as abandoned urban centre sites and landbanks of zoned land on the edges of urban areas. This tax should be levied at a rate of €2,000 per hectare, or part thereof, and that is its suggestion and not mine. The objective of the tax should be to encourage landowners to utilise the land they possess and prevent speculation and landbanking. In the context of a shortage of housing stock, building new units is not the entire solution, and we all know that. There remains a large number of empty units across the country. Social Justice Ireland goes on to note that policy should be designed to reduce the number of these units and penalise those who own the units and leave them vacant for more than a six month period. That is a bit short but they certainly cannot be left that way.

It further proposes that budget 2019 introduces a levy on empty houses of €200 per month, with the revenue from this charge collected and kept by local authorities. Income from both these measures should reduce the Central Fund allocation to local authorities by €75 million per annum.

Social Justice Ireland's analysis goes on to acknowledge the recent report from the ESRI which recommended that, for environmental reasons, Government should equalise the excise duty on petrol and diesel, which is something Deputy Danny Healy-Rae raised today. It proposes a decrease of 6 cent per litre for petrol from 59 cent to 53 cent, and a simultaneous increase of 6 cent per litre for diesel. This would yield a total of €88 million and there are many ways we could be creative. As usual, however, it is highly unlikely that any of these measures will be implemented because the Minister and this Government have, at heart, no real social conscience in terms of the impact on the poorest of the poor, or if they have one, it is on the soles of their shoes. To talk about rainy day funds when there is a storm covering every parish in the country in terms of homelessness is appalling nonsense and I call on the Minister to be a bit more imaginative and courageous in his financial wizardry.

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