Michael Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thanked the Minister in a public forum the other day but I thank him again. On a personal basis I followed his political career for decades and always admired him. I always knew he was a person of great capability and I am delighted to see him where I like to see him. Enough about that.

At the outset I will tell a story of how FDI can work at its most practical level. In the town of Killarney was a great man, Macky Shea, who started a great business, M D O'Shea. He worked very hard. He started off cutting timber in a place call the High Wood and the Dark Wood outside Killarney. He drew that timber into Killarney town. He had a sawmill. He cut up the planks and sold them. That grew into a hardware shop which today is known as M D O'Shea and Sons. That man, Macky Shea as we called him, was friends with other business people in the town. A man came to Kerry wondering where to locate his business. He was thinking of going somewhere completely different from Killarney but he met Macky Shea and a couple of other people who took him for dinner. They explained what the town of Killarney had to offer. They took him out the following day to the Lakes of Killarney and showed him the beautiful scenery and let him see and feel what Killarney was going to be like. That man's name was Hans Liebherr. The result of that was Liebherr Cranes coming to Fossa in Killarney.

I thank God they are there but it would have made sense when importing and exporting much or all of the goods to be near deep water. That would be more beneficial but those great business people in Killarney at that time sold the location of Killarney. They sold the Kerry people on Hans Liebherr. My late father, Jackie Healy-Rae, in his time ensured that he got money for a link road in Killarney and that the name of the road is the Hans Liebherr Road. When we pass that link road we think of Hans Liebherr and the Liebherr family. We are so grateful to them for the work and the money they brought and the wealth they created. There are families in Killarney for many years who have the Liebherr family to thank for their gainful employment over the years. That is what you call foreign direct investment at its best.

This involved hundreds and thousands of people back over the years and to this present day being gainfully employed, doing excellent work in excellent working conditions. When people retired when they were tired and had served their time, they are generously treated by the Liebherr Group. We have to nurture that.

I hear some people in this House criticising people who are wealthy, for instance, Denis O’Brien or the Smurfits of the world, people who create work; and they are spoken about as if they are criminals or as if there is something wrong with them. The only thing that is wrong with those types of people is that there should be more of them so that we would have full employment and a lot more jobs. We would then have people with brains, the ability to create wealth, work, and have a positive environment for our people. That is what we want.

My whole point is that we want to ensure that through our tax regime and what people inside in this House say, we do not want people in other parts of the world to think that they will not be welcome in Ireland and that these people in this House are doing there is sitting in brown seats, jumping up and down, and talking about how everything should be for nothing, and that we do not want people who have money because we want to tax them to death, or keep them out of the place. That is not how the world works.

For us to work, we need to have people who create the jobs. We need to people like Hans Liebherr and the wealthy people of the world to come and to create jobs here. We have to make it attractive.

I could rely on a person like the Minister of State but there is a great number of people who leave a great deal to be desired because if people were thinking about coming here, they might think twice if they were listening to some the speeches. I will use my last couple of seconds to say this to the House. I hear people standing up inside here in the Dáil talking about the sooner that we get to the four-day working week. This comes from fellas who never got up in the morning and did a day’s work in their lives themselves at home, and who are lucky to be here because they would have no place else to work because they could not create a day’s work for themselves, never mind anyone else, and they never paid a man or a woman on a Friday, and never will. To hell with the four-day working week. Many of us would like to work seven days a week, if we could get it.

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