Maurice Cummins (Fine Gael)

I welcome my colleague from the south east, Deputy Connick, who is now a Minister of State. I wish him well in his post and I am sure he will do an excellent job representing not only the south east but the country in an exemplary manner.

Over the past 18 months we have seen over 200,000 mothers, fathers and young people lose their jobs. The vast majority of these are under 30 years of age. We look to them to create the building bricks for our economic future. They are faced with unemployment and immigration. It is very sad to see so many forced out of this country to seek employment and opportunities abroad. My son graduated last year and he tells me 60%-70% of his classmates have left the country. They did not do so for fun, as the Tánaiste might suggest, but to seek opportunities abroad. This Finance Bill provides no incentives, no hope and no ambition to tackle unemployment. It condemns another generation of bright young, ambitious and educated people to seek employment abroad. That is also difficult enough. This is the legacy of this tired Government, which has been in office for too long and is bereft of the drive, ambition and will to explore new imaginative policies to get people back to work. This should be the number one priority for any Government.

I listened with interest to Senator Walsh and other Government Senators saying benchmarking was a mistake. Slow learners, I suggest. Benchmarking might have been successful if the necessary reforms had been implemented and the Government had shown some leadership. We see the results of the lack of leadership in the current problems in the public service. How any Government can cut the pay of low paid public servants at a time when billions of euro are pumped into Anglo Irish Bank with little or no prospect of a return for hard-pressed taxpayers is mind-boggling.

My party recognised that €4 billion in cuts were necessary but we adopted a fairer and more prudent approach in the alternative budget we proposed. We certainly did not propose to attack public servants on low pay. We proposed to exempt the first €30,000 of salary from cuts. Would we have the same problems with the employees in the public service if the Government had adopted that approach? Perhaps we would but I suggest to the Minister that we would be on much firmer ground because the proposals would have been much fairer.

The lack of ambition and vision in this Finance Bill is depressing when set against Ireland's economic challenges. Thousands of struggling households will be bitterly disappointed that the hoped for stimulus has not materialised in this Finance Bill. I suggest it is more of a tidying up exercise to make life easier for the Revenue Commissioners and tax advisers rather than for householders, people in negative equity and those who are now in arrears with their mortgages.

The Minister made a major blunder in announcing that the worst was over. I do not believe the worst is over. The Minister would have been better advised to listen to the suggestions of my party, and indeed the Labour Party, and take at least some of them on board.

It is also extremely disappointing that the Minister ignored the recommendations from his own Commission on Taxation to introduce new smart tax concessions to help the unemployed pay for retraining and second chance education, to support innovation by small businesses fighting to survive by allowing them offset their research spending against PRSI, to support start-up sole trader businesses, as has been done for companies, and help those in negative equity by lowering Ireland's exceptionally high rates of stamp duty on house purchases.

The only impact of this Finance Bill on ordinary families is the application of a 13.5% VAT rate for the first time on local authority services such as road tolls, bin charges and off-street parking, and the axing of existing income tax reliefs for bin charges.

Regarding the carbon tax, despite the major problems identified with the tax on coal and peat the Minister is ploughing on regardless. It is likely that coal with a far higher carbon content will be imported from Northern Ireland, thereby avoiding the tax the Minister is proposing, but the Minister has not come up with a solution to that problem.

As I pointed out, through the Commission on Taxation and the proposals that Fine Gael and indeed the Labour Party have made, the Minister could have come up with a far greater stimulus package to create an injection into the economy and get people back to work. That is the issue on which I began my contribution. Getting people back to work must be the priority of this Government. What we see in this Finance Bill does nothing to get people back to work. That is why it has failed in its intent. If it was intended that this would be some type of stimulus package, it has failed miserably. I look forward to the Minister's comments.