I distinctly remember being in Cabinet as Government Chief Whip for two and a half years. At every single Cabinet meeting there was a presentation by the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment of four to five files sanctioning and announcing new enterprises all over the place. Now we have a jobs closure every second day. All one has to do is look at the Forfás annual review and report for last year. The annual review revealed that almost 32,000 jobs were lost in companies supported by the IDA or Enterprise Ireland last year. In the past two years the number of jobs lost was 61,000. These job losses are mainly down to the Government's policy of hiking up charges, imposing stealth taxes and allowing inflation and costs to spiral out of control. Some 90% of the net jobs lost were in foreign owned companies which are more sensitive to cost pressures. The Government seems to have forgotten a fundamental lesson that in a small open economy like Ireland one cannot plough one's own furrow on tax and spend policies and not expect it to impact on the enterprise sector. The Government may have fooled the electorate but it cannot sidestep the hard realities of a competitive global economy.