David Norris (Independent)

Yes, there is. The other side is spinning it furiously in the opposite direction. I am not interested in that but I am interested in one fact, that in none of the contributions so far, by the Minister of State, Government speakers or Opposition speakers, has there been any mention of the moral parameters which led to this crisis. This has been instigated by greed, folly, gambling, stupidity and all these things which the western cultural tradition should have warned us against.

I find it unusual that I am in agreement with His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI. It is interesting that he recently issued an encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, Charity in Truth, in which he rejects unbridled market capitalism and the unregulated market, describing them as thoroughly destructive in their abuse of the system. He indicates that every economic decision has a moral dimension and looks for forms of redistribution of wealth. This is not what I expected to hear from the Pope but I very much welcome it. One of the deficiencies in the report is that, while it contains a good deal of facts, some of which are disputed, and a good deal of economy theory, there is no recognition of the fact that this difficulty was created through means that were grossly immoral and there is no recognition of the need to re-establish a moral parameter in which profit is not the only motivating consideration. The Pope suggests international regulation and he makes the good point that "the conviction that the economy must be autonomous, that it must be shielded from "influences" of a moral character, has led man to abuse the economic process in a thoroughly destructive way", and he is right.

We heard Margaret Thatcher say that there was no such thing as society, there is only the economy. Other people have said that naked greed is good. People engage for short-term profit, not the long-term perspective of business that, for all their faults, the Victorians did, with their paternalism and attempt to take care of workers, employers such as Cadbury and Guinness and those sorts of people, but this has all been lost.

I have been saying this for some considerable time, but I was interested to read a report in one of today's newspapers about the Nobel prize-winning economist, Professor Amartya Sen from Harvard University. I heard him speak on radio this morning. He gave a lecture yesterday, entitled "On Global Confusion". He suggested that what we need is a new capitalism. That makes it all the more disastrous that the Americans and conservative religious elements, including the Vatican, conspire to destroy that extraordinary and unique experiment in Nicaragua where they were attempting to pick the best out of capitalism and communism and bring them together without fear of ideological label in the interests of humanity.

It is interesting that Adam Smith is often promoted as an advocate of the free market system, yet Professor Amartya Sen quoted a sentence Adam Smith wrote at the start of his first book in 1759 as follows: "How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it." Professor Amartya Sen said that we have to go beyond merely the profit motive.

The same extends to this notion of competitiveness and competition. It is tragic that many people confuse competition with competitiveness. Competition does not always lead to competitiveness. We need think only of the disaster of Eircom where it was spun out to the capitalist moguls to be asset-stripped and then flung back. Now we have a disastrous telephone system. We have access to phones only because of mobile telephones, for which Eircom has no responsibility.

The Minister of State recognises the difficulty and he quoted some of the facts. The IMF indicates that the forecast is that Ireland will contract by 9.8% this year. That is twice the European average. That is a dangerous situation for us to be in and it is extremely worrying that this should be the case. The Minister of State spoke about addressing that by cutting the public service. There is some suggestion there may be tax increases. The IMF indicates that it is much preferable to cut expenditure than to increase taxation. I very much hope that this suggestion will be followed by the Government.

The Minister of State referred to the special group on public services, which has a long name but is known as an bord snip nua. There has been considerable criticism, including from those on the Government benches in the Dáil for not publishing this report. I am in favour of transparency and accountability but, from a tactical point of view, the Government would be mad to publish it. This is a document that was intended for the information of Cabinet to inform decision-making, it is not a report to be picked over by the press at this stage. We should have access to it subsequently, but in its initial phrase this is a report to be used to inform Government decision-making. I have no difficulty with the fact that we are not privy to its exact recommendations because the minute the report hits the press, if the Government thinks that the squeals from the old age pensioners, farmers and other groups were loud, it had better get ear plugs because there will be a scream that would outdo Harry Porter, once this report hits the fan. From a tactical point of view, the Government is perfectly right not to publish it.

There is talk about radical transformation of the pubic service. A former Minister for Finance, Deputy McCreevy, made a complete dog's dinner of the pubic service with his lunatic introduction of the decentralisation programme and we are still paying the consequences of that. It is these kinds of haphazard unplanned decisions that got us into this mess. Ministers, including the Taoiseach, are now attempting to correct matters and they are taking some courageous decisions - most of the decisions the Government has taken are ones the Opposition would take if it were in government. However, the Government has great difficulty in terms of credibility because the personnel in office are the same personnel who presided over the bubble.

The IMF report is clear. It states that Ireland was perhaps the most over-heated of all advanced economies. It predicts a lost decade for Ireland, that we will not recover until 2017. At Christmas, we will have 500,000 people unemployed and, naturally, people will blame the Ministers who are members of the Government that helped to overheat our economy. The IMF estimates that the total loss in our banking system will be €35 billion for property developments alone. The worrying aspect of that is that there is a possibility of a domino effect where this will extend into other sectors of the economy. Our rate of unemployment is 11.9%, 413,500 people are unemployed and we now have the second highest unemployment figure in Europe. That is worrying.

I am a neutral. I do not take any comfort from the Government's misery because it is shared by the entire country. There is some small evidence of green shoots. I am surprised that the Government did not mention that in the midst of all this wretchedness and decline in the banks - personally I would let a number of them go hang - our manufacturing exports have increased. This is the kind of hope we need to hang on to. The country needs a bit of hope. We must continue to invest. I was pleased that the Minister for Transport, Deputy Noel Dempsey, gave an assurance the metro will go ahead. That will provide not only useful infrastructure but also employment.

It is very important that we do not dehumanise economics, that we understand that it is a moral not just a technical failure. Unless we address the moral issues we will not get back to the situation we were in. Perhaps we should not get back to precisely the same situation because it was the springboard into this mess.

When this crisis has been addressed, and even while it is being addressed, we must look at the elephant in the room, which is population. That is what is driving every single problem, the extinction of animal species all over the planet, global warming, resource wars, the using up of fossil fuels and the basic problem of water shortages. If we do not put those things in moral perspective and learn to share and to respect this planet, we will be everlastingly in this cycle of misery and unhappiness.