Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Given the limited time available to me, I will focus in my reply on matters relating to the economy and investment. There were some questions about the tech sector. The assessment I gave many months ago was that I thought the tech sector was down-sizing or re-sizing by about 10% or 15%. This is not too far off the mark. It comes after a period of rapid expansion. Tech companies that expanded rapidly over the past three years are now re-sizing or down-sizing by about 10% or 15%. In the medium to long term, this is a sector where we will see phenomenal new growth in terms of jobs and investment because the future is digital. It is AI, robotics, VR, AR and the metaverse so any jobs that have been lost will be recovered in the years ahead. It is reassuring to see that the vast majority of people who have lost jobs in the tech sector have got good redundancy packages and have been able to find employment in other parts of the economy, which is now close to full employment. I do not have any update on PayPal since I last corresponded with the Deputy but I am certainly aware of the issues that have been raised.

Deputy Carthy and a number of others mentioned the surplus. I would argue that we used the surplus last year both to pay down debt and to set aside for the inevitable fall off in revenues that will occur in the future through the strategic reserve fund. We also gave back to people. The last budget package was pretty huge - €10 billion or €12 billion in additional spending, welfare and tax reductions - so people have already seen the benefits of the surplus in their lives. Anyone paying less for childcare this year will know that as will anyone paying less for public transport, any family that received free school books in September or anyone who received a SUSI grant he or she did not have before so we have already used the surplus to help people with the very real problems they have while still paying down the debt and setting aside money in that anti-austerity fund to make sure we do not have to be faced ever with the kind of decisions we were faced with when the crash occurred 12 years ago.

Deputy Carthy is right about one point. The surplus does mean that we have additional firepower to help solve some of the problems we face as a country and it does mean that we can spend more and save more. However, I think, as I hope is increasingly clear to people, that money is not the constraint that it used to be in terms of solving our problems. We have a lot of money and we are spending a lot of money. I hear people talking about under-investment in public infrastructure. When I was first appointed to Government in 2011, the public capital budget was about €3 billion or €4 billion. It will be €14 billion this year. We have increased threefold or fourfold the amount of money we invest in public infrastructure in Ireland. We now invest well above the EU average in public infrastructure and are well above the countries we often compare ourselves with when it comes to investment in public capital such as the Netherlands and Denmark.

If there was a decade of underinvestment in infrastructure in Ireland after the crash, and there was, that decade ended a long time ago. It ended probably around 2018 or 2019. Since then we have had phenomenal public capital investment under this Government and under the previous one, which I had the privilege to lead. That continues, but there are consequences to that. The housing budget is now so big - €4.5 billion a year - that sometimes it can be difficult to spend it. That is one of the reasons we made the decision today to allocate some money to reducing the cost of construction.

In the education budget, we allocated an extra €300 million only a few weeks ago. It is not for more schools but just because the cost of building schools went up. Sometimes the more money we pump in does not mean higher output, just higher costs. We are seeing that as a real issue at the moment. In the past two or three years in the health service, something has happened that would have been unimaginable ten or 15 years ago where the health service has not been able to hire all the staff it has been allocated money for. Collectively, we in this Chamber, for the benefit of the public and for everyone, need to move away from the simplistic idea that just allocating more money will necessarily solve these problems. It will not; we have other constraints. The constraints are around availability of labour, skills and materials. You can be on a waiting list for steel now, for example. We need to be a bit more upfront and honest with people about that. It is not just a case of spending the surplus and solving all our problems. We are already allocating massive amounts of public spending. Public spending could hit €100 billion in the next couple of years. Could anyone have imagined that a few years ago? It is not just about writing cheques and solving problems. It would be very easy if that was all that was involved.

Deputy Boyd Barrett asked about buying housing from developers for social and affordable housing. That is something we are doing. Project Tosaigh is exactly that, where the Land Development Agency, LDA, is purchasing developments for social housing. We are going to do more of that. Then there is the tenant in situ scheme, where we have allocated funding to local authorities to buy 1,500 properties from landlords who are selling up. We have said very clearly to local authorities that if they meet that target of 1,500, we will provide additional funding for that scheme.

Deputies mentioned a number of individual companies. I do not know enough about them to get into giving detailed answers. They do seem to be employment law matters and industrial relations matters. I do not have the information the Deputies seek but I will alert the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment to the fact it was raised here and perhaps he might come back with better answers.

Deputy O’Sullivan asked about tourism. He is right that the visitor numbers from the early part of the year are behind where they were in 2019. That is what we compare with, obviously, because it was before the pandemic. We do not know what the summer is going to look like. From talking to people who work in the industry and in tourism, they are pretty optimistic that the summer will be a good one and, whatever about the British, the Americans appear to be back and they tend to spend more than other visitors. I do not know of any particular schemes the Government has in place to encourage hotel building. While I can understand why people in the tourism industry would like us to build more hotels so that we can have more tourists, when the construction sector is facing capacity constraints, I would not like to see us build more hotels, unfortunately. I would rather see the focus on housing and other things. Those are the decisions we just have to make. The Deputy is spot on about work permits and critical skills. We have issued about 40,000 work permits in the past year.

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