Conor Lenihan (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail)

I note with interest and gratitude the thanks the Senator so clearly gave me. Some elements of my speech must have been addressing her concerns if she was noble enough to say "Thank you". I thank her for that.

There are some key statistics about the economy of our country which are interesting. We are the fourth most open economy in the world and the second most entrepreneurial country in Europe. Eighty per cent of what we physically produce in this country is for export, 76% of those exports are generated from the multinational sector and 5% of our GDP, twice the European average, is spent on our public capital programme. We are maintaining that through the worst recession the country has seen since the 1920s.

There are a few talismanic figures and statistics which show that Ireland remains intensely competitive and globalised, up there and competing with the best countries in the world. It is no accident that 50% of the inward investment gains and wins we have made in the past two years are in the area of innovation, research and development and science and technology. These valuable investments of those two years show the competitive strength of the intellectual capital we have built in this country through our universities and institutes of technology. Ireland is now a good place for people to invest if they wish to locate a research and development activity here. That is the message I get when I make visits to the United States and elsewhere. Basically, in a great many cases, the competition boils down to us and Switzerland when we pitch for investments on the research and development side or for shared services activities, whether in the IFSC or elsewhere among the corporations that have established a presence in Ireland. That is good news. We are up there with the best and are still competing and winning the high-end jobs that will represent the future here.

I heard Senators say - it is almost a ritual now - that the Government has no recovery plan. We took the opportunity through the Taoiseach to launch our recovery plan by means of the smart economy framework. That is a very strong document which very few people in either House appear to have read. That is the Government's recovery plan and is one that would have had to be enunciated publicly in any event, even if we were not going through the severe downturn we went through in recent years. We would have had to move up the proverbial value chain into a higher end of manufacture and services. We are doing that as we must have done even if there was not an international recession. The clear evidence from before the period of recession is that many jobs of a lower order of manufacture and service provision were moving or drifting away to other locations - to central or eastern Europe, the Far East, etc. We have executed this particular move, therefore, in a time of great difficulty but have managed and moved it. Again the evidence is present about the recovery being under way. If one talks to Enterprise Ireland, it is very clear that a recovery is happening in this economy. If one talks to international people involved in freight forwarding, one hears the containers are filling up again. International trade is becoming more robust as the weeks and months turn.

In Ireland, the most recent survey by the NCB purchasing managing index shows that manufacturing expanded for three months in a row. The most recent figures from that index are very interesting because they show that not only is manufacturing expanding, but the employment associated with manufacture also expanded in the most recent three month period of which I speak. That is very interesting because, generally speaking, it is typical that manufacturing employment lags as does the actual expansion of manufacturing. In other words, employers take the opportunity to move to newer forms of technology and higher productivity which does not involve adding extra jobs. Now, however, we are in a very good place. Manufacturing is expanding as is the associated employment. That is really good news and bears out a great many things that were said to me by leading international bankers, financiers and economists when I was in New York some months ago. They said they believe Ireland will come out of recession perhaps more quickly than even the United States, precisely because we are a nimble, agile, globalised economy, the fourth most open economy in the world, and that we will emerge much faster with the onset of international recovery.

The smart economy, with its emphasis on science, technology and innovation is at the heart of where we want to be, as a country in the future with high quality jobs, whether in green tech, the food sector, ICT or bio-pharma. A figure not often quoted in public is the fact that more than 40% of our GDP is generated from the pharma, chemicals, bio-tech and bio-pharma sectors. This is an enormous amount of our GDP. One of the key challenges for us as our economy moves forward is how we achieve convergence, as between some of the major investments which have been made in Ireland in the bio-pharma and bio-tech sectors and in ICT. If we can achieve a level of convergence between these different industries, we will create thousands of extra jobs in this economy. There are good prospects for our economy.

This debate has been very good because people should always remember that we must stop running ourselves down in this country. I do not say the Opposition, this week at any rate, has been so negative with regard to the Government. It is very important, whether one is in Opposition or in positions that command public air time, to stop running down this country. Other countries with bigger economies than ours have had many more difficulties. France and Germany have had 35% drops in their exports. In recent years we have experienced a decrease of only in the order of 6% which is very low compared to those big trading economies. When one hears what the commentary is like in France, Germany or the UK, one notes that people do not go around advertising their difficulties. Bigger countries do not use their national media as some sort of therapy to give out about things or to run themselves down.