Michael McGrath (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I agree with the broad thrust of what the Deputy has said. The dial has shifted and continues to shift in the sense that the Government is genuinely committed to an ambitious public capital investment programme. However, we cannot ignore the reality of the scale of the national debt and debt per capita, which is high in the developed world. We are in an environment of historically low interest rates because of the exceptional interventions of the European Central Bank. Those interventions will not continue indefinitely. We will be returning to more normal market conditions, perhaps as early as next year. All of the borrowing we are doing now is appropriate but we cannot predict what interest rates will be when it comes to refinancing those bonds in ten years or 15 years. We must have a firm eye on the long-term debt sustainability of our country and protect that for future generations. There is a way of marrying that with having an ambitious public capital investment programme. I acknowledge the point that borrowing for capital is of a different nature to borrowing for current expenditure purposes.

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