Shane Ross (Independent)

I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Dara Calleary. It is the first time I have seen him here. Perhaps that is because I was not present when he was here previously. It is a great pleasure to see him. I hope he has a very successful ministerial career, which undoubtedly he will have. I wish him well. He comes at a very difficult period for the economy and for the House.

The IMF and OECD reports are very welcome because they are among the few impartial and independent reports we get on the state of the economy. We are used to getting reports from flawed sources. The Government and the Opposition naturally pick and choose from all the reports and decide to extract those parts to emphasise that suit them. What does not suit will be discarded. We have already seen that happen. Speakers have echoed the point that the reports condemned what happened between 2004 and 2008 but that since then the Government is on the right track. That is a point of view with which I broadly but not totally agree. What they have done is tried to draw a line under the past and to suggest a route forward for the future, which is exactly what the Government is doing. It is harder for the Government to do that because drawing a line under one's own stewardship is something one cannot do in politics. Having done that, the IMF said, broadly speaking, the Government is probably on the right road and if it keeps to that road it might come out of the crisis.

We have had a problem in the past with reports of this type. I do not include the ESRI in this because it has developed in recent years a record for independence that is quite commendable and courageous. It has said a lot of things the Government does not approve of, does not like or finds politically uncomfortable, so it must be excepted from the general rule that economists here tend to write reports to order. By that I mean that predictably enough the economists who write for the banks and stockbrokers tend to write reports that are inevitably bullish about the economy. The banks' economists contributed-----