Paul Gogarty (Dublin Mid West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Go raibh maith agat. I welcome the opportunity to have this discussion. It is also good to know we will have a further chance to talk about the current Trump slump later today.

It is widely known that in the 1940s and 1950s, the cliché was that Ireland's biggest exports were live cattle and people. Many of these people went on to create lives and send money back to Ireland from the UK and the US. These early immigrants who contributed to the United States in so many ways are part of the great diaspora that Trumps likes to talk up during elections, but then he treated Ireland people so disrespectfully on St. Patrick's Day by bringing that thug to the White House, which I referenced before. We have moved a long way since those days of live exports and people thanks to the policies of the Lemass Government at the time and in particular the great T. K. Whitaker. Ireland's economic policy to try to get manufacturing into Ireland was his brainchild. We got German and American companies, companies from the UK or anywhere else. We had a cheaper cost of production and the skills and Ireland built up a manufacturing base throughout the fifties and sixties. This morphed into IT and pharmaceuticals and because of that base we have a skill set. On one hand, we are going to face a lot of economic turmoil. It will be different from the global crash in 2008, which some would say was exacerbated by the policies of the Fianna Fáil Administrations before that, but we are going to face testing times and we need to have strategies in place to deal with that. However, it is different and we need to have a balance between scaremongering on one hand and trying to have proper schemes to deal with this crisis on the other.

Let us look first at the slightly more positive aspects, to which some speakers have alluded. The pharmaceutical sector in Ireland is massive and it is not entirely based on exports to the US. Even if a pharma tariff comes in and hits our exports in a big way, we are not going to have a massive relocation to the US because of the skill set and the base we have. The talk has been that down the line we may not get investment in newer technologies but there will not be a sudden drop-off or a total collapse of our economy. At the same time, it is a wake-up call because we do not know whether there may be a rebalancing in the House of Representatives and the US Senate two years from now and the Democrats bringing a little bit of common sense back into it. As the long-term shift in the US is going to be a little more isolationist in any event, we have to start looking to diversify. We cannot do it today but we can do it over two to three years. If there is a message I would like to send out, it is that we need to start possibly setting up a special committee on dealing with this crisis and inviting all the best experts in to it and looking at how we can move forward. In the debate later today, I will look at a few suggestions in that regard but I want to focus in the minute I have remaining in this slot on what we absolutely should be doing, which is investing in self-sufficiency in energy.

Some 80% of our energy requirements come from imports. We should start making strategic investments in a big way to get rid of the requirement for oil and gas, either through green hydrogen or through renewables. I mentioned in a number of debates in this House that it is not just about offshore and onshore wind energy; it is also about wave technology. We are ten years behind Demark and Scotland. We should be at the forefront and put some of our strategic reserves into that investment because for a small amount of short-term pain in terms of not having money to spend on other things, we will avoid having to spend up to €6 billion on those imports every year and, no matter what the world throws at us in global crises, at least we will have our self-sufficiency in energy. Countries like Iceland that have geothermal power are able to produce all sorts of foodstuffs no matter what sort of crisis the world is in. We are not as badly off as we are painting it. We do have potential and I will talk about that during the later debate.

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