Mark Dearey (Green Party)

Trading and Investing in the Smart Economy is a welcome document which ties in with other job creation and sectoral development strategies such as the report of the high level group on green enterprise. Senator Donohoe challenged how well the integration of the various strategies was proceeding. A more integrated approach is being taken in this regard. The first thing that the trading and investing in the smart economy strategy identifies is that it is through trade and enterprise that jobs are created. Jobs are not being put before enterprise and trade, rather, they are seen as a consequence of improving our enterprise and trade. It is a very simple point. It is a horse and cart argument but unfortunately we hear far too often that the cart is being put ahead of the horse by many who are proposing stimulus packages to generate jobs without identifying what the markets are for the activity that those jobs would be engaged in.

A number of stimulus ideas I have heard all involve large amounts of borrowing. It is beholden on the people and parties proposing these ideas to say from whom they will be borrowing and at what cost, and what impression additional borrowing would create among those who are currently lending to Ireland whom we are, unfortunately, over dependent on for historic reasons. We need to acknowledge that is the case.

Any increase in the public deficit, which is effectively what these plans would involve, will be seen as a lack of political will and economic wit and would result in potentially disastrous scenarios for Ireland as a whole. The document is correct to focus on trade and enterprise which will deliver jobs if we target properly and identify our markets and what it is we are good at doing. There is some merit in Senator Donohoe's contribution, namely, the charge that the document spreads its ambitions too wide. It is something to which I am listening, but if one takes the individual strategic documents one will find they seek to incorporate and integrate those ambitions and the charge the Senator made can be answered to some extent.

To identify exports is a fairly obvious position to take but given how small the domestic market is we do not have any alternative but to trade our way out of where we now find ourselves and do that on the basis of finding markets abroad. Some 80% of all economic activity is export-driven. We need to maintain that and improve on it. I welcome the fact the new strategy very clearly gives benchmarks against which its success can be measured. The headline figure of 150,000 new jobs is impressive. The calculation is that for every one job in the export sector that is created, one spin-off job is also created in the local economy. Therefore, we will have a grand total of 300,000 jobs by 2015, a figure which grabbed the headlines last week and created some scepticism.

When one drills down into those figures, one finds they make sense. That is what I would like to do in regard to the green economy in particular. The IDA has taken responsibility for the generation of 75,000 jobs by 2015 and Enterprise Ireland for 60,000 jobs by the same date. In tourism another 15,000 jobs will be created. Not all of the jobs are in the smart economy sector per se but all of them can have value added to them by the smart economy. I refer in particular to areas such as forestry. According to the Teagasc figures I examined recently, every 6 ha planted creates a job, be it in nursery work, forest management or the upstream job creation that saw mills, wood production, product production and so on generate.

There are jobs for people in more traditional sectors that we can and are turning our attention to, but the focus must always be on adding value and that can be done by locking onto the smart economy applications. Another good example is getting the smart grid up and running. There are enormous opportunities for the SME sector, in particular, to make products to make the grid smart and to move it on from simply being a transmission network into an intelligent distribution service that provides real-time advice to customers and back hauls information to the generating station in order that it can make smarter and more intelligent choices. This will ultimately lead to a reduction in the amount of energy we need to use.

This is one of the things that gives me great hope about this document and the general thrust of Irish industrial policy. "Industrial policy" almost sounds like a phrase from the 1970s. People often accuse the Green Party of speaking a kind of policy language that nobody understands when it uses words like "sustainability" and I confess that we sometimes do that. Everybody now knows what unsustainability is because we have been through it. We unfortunately lost sight of where our economy was sustainable and strong, and diverted far too much attention into the construction and development sectors which accounted for 24% of all economic activity in 2007, over twice what most mature economies invest in those sectors.

That was always a dangerous path to follow, but particularly so when the tax base came to rely on that activity. I am being critical of previous policy but it is fair to say that because we have come to a complete halt as a result of some of that activity. Whatever about the past, we now need to design unsustainable practices out of the future economy and create a tax base, which is a parallel process and not related directly to what we are discussing, that can meet the day-to-day needs of the country. I would like to think such a tax base would be driven by taxes that will not disappear as the whims of the market come and go but that can be real and sustained over time.

This document gives me great hope because we are going through a groaning and a long and painful economic turnaround. We are not just trying to get economic activity going again, rather we are trying to create a new economy and I would like to characterise at least some of that economy as being a green economy. It was good to hear the previous speaker discuss how the green economy can ultimately deliver. It is not a propriety phrase to use; I am not trying to suggest that my party has ownership of that idea. In fact, it would be disastrous if the idea became overly politicised. It is important that everybody embraces it because we urgently need to create an economy that decouples growth from resource use.

If we continue to pursue the model which, in extremis, we saw in the late 19th century where heavy industry in Britain such as the linen mills developed, and later on the massive use of oil in heavy industry in the United States in areas which eventually became the rust buckets, we can see how if we pursue economic growth that is based simply on the ever increasing use of scarce and finite resources, we will also come to a crash just as our construction boom came to a crash. A decoupling of economic growth from resource use is required. This document comes up trumps in that regard; whether it is intentional it happened. The Minister of State is nodding that it is intentional and I am glad to hear that. I thank him for that confirmation.

These are some of the realisations that this document can deliver, namely, a productive, export-led economy that is light on resource use and that is replacing imported energy with home produced energy. I understand oil prices alone cost €6 billion per year. We could save €1 billion of that by 2015. Think of the pain we are going through at present to cut our deficit by several billion euro a year. If we could write off on an annual basis €1 billion of oil imports by 2015, we would be doing very well. Projects such as the Oriel wind project in my area, which I would love to see up and running and which produces 315 MW, account for that oil importation substitution as well as creating a fantastic array of jobs in high value areas such as mechanical engineering, wind surveying and the host of skill sets that are required to bring wind to the grid. We have fantastic opportunities that will meet the demands of the future. The document, Trading and Investing in the Smart Economy, responds to and brings together the range of Forfás and high level group reports we have and that are causing some confusion. With a bit of work and patience we can begin to see how they all slot together and get this country churning and doing the heavy lifting again.