Eoghan Harris (Independent)

I thank Senator Callely and wish to develop one of his most important points which is the need to draw people in. I will not discuss gloom and doom tonight. The Minister of State, like the entire Cabinet, is showing the signs of the long days and nights. I do not know from where they get their stamina; they certainly earn their few bob.

I appeal to the Minister of State, because he will understand, that the recovery programme or fightback be tailored to the national psyche. We are not Swedes or Germans or people who like the long haul. The genius of Irish people is in improvisation. One will see in any town or village in Ireland that people hate being told that Monday five months from now, they are going to lift the boat from the harbour or do something else. I have seen people in west Cork do that in one night in a hurry with pontoons because they want to get on with it. We are bored by plans such as giving up smoking in March 2015. That is not us.

The two letters "FF" should stand for "Fast, fast". Everything should be faster. What we particularly need to do is draw people in to a national programme of recovery that suits the Irish psyche. Our people should be drawn in by small measures. The young generation could be drawn in by putting a penny on every text. The banks should be required to supply free textbooks to schools for the next ten years to pay back some money. We should do imaginative things such as leaving the unfinished Anglo Irish Bank headquarters on the Liffey unfinished as a monument to everything that went wrong. We should forget about school uniforms for a while and they should not be mandatory so as to lift that burden from people. We should ask retired teachers to come back and act as special needs teachers.

There are many things we can do. There should be a designated Minister to do imaginative things to draw people in as they were drawn in during the Emergency. This may not sound fashionable but the people of Ireland actually enjoyed the Emergency. There is an upside to the current situation. The recession is a grim reaper and is exposing a lot of the fat-cattery, so to speak, that went on in this country. A lot of reform is going on and a lot of good stuff is happening.

We should draw in young, middle aged and older people. Why not ask old age pensioners if they want to pay a voluntary fare of €1 on public transport provided it is linked to a job? I know many elderly people and old age pensioners who would be happy to give a euro if they thought it would create a job in the private sector. We should start linking these levies. I think there should be many more of them and the Government did not cut deep enough.

Above all, it is very wrong that the Government intends to draw this pain out. It is bad and I appeal to the Minister of State to talk to his colleagues about it. The pain should not be extended over four or five years. Irish people get bored and annoyed by these long timescales. Let us have the misery over with now, and fast. The hard stuff should be done over the next two years. Let us really live with tight belts buckled tight now. Let us not drag it out. We should have more levies and an increase in taxation.

I heard Cathal MacCoille on RTE the other morning and he was effectively appealing to the Tánaiste to get on with the job, stop drifting and dig in deep. He is speaking for many of us. Many people would rather get it over with now than drag it out. We are not Germans. We do not want 30-year plans.