Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Nobody should pretend that the €750 billion solves the problem for the EU. Every individual country needs to make decisions for itself. We have extraordinary challenges in the next couple of years to budget appropriately and get the balance right between managing deficits, providing stimulus, getting people back to work, and ensuring we retain the trust and faith of international markets from which we will be borrowing enormous sums of money in the next couple of years. EU-provided funding is part of the overall mix, but that is all it is. As a result of many of the difficult decisions we have taken over the past decade or so to rebuild our economy and strengthen it, unlike some other countries Ireland is in the fortunate position to be able to borrow a considerable amount of money at competitive interest rates and very low servicing costs. We will be using that.

We want to maintain the confidence of those markets so that we can continue to do it in the future if we need to. We will look to supplement the money we will borrow for ourselves with accessing the appropriate resources as they become available in different sectors from EU funds as well. Like the example the Deputy highlighted, countries need to make their own decisions to manage their own economies given the circumstances in which they find themselves. Unfortunately, some countries may not have the capacity we have and will rely more than we will on collective EU funds. Of course, we need to try to access funds that we have been part of raising.

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