Terry Leyden (Fianna Fail)

I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Mary White, and wish her continued success in her position. I am sure she will find it an interesting challenge. I commend Senator Quinn on his good contribution.

I am delighted we have an opportunity to discuss this issue. We are where we are. There is a sense of shared responsibility coming to the fore with the decision by the Labour Party and Fine Gael to accept the target of reducing the deficit to 3% of GDP by 2014. This is a positive decision, and I commend the leader of the Green Party, Deputy Gormley, on bringing it about. It was his initiative and he deserves great credit. It has been adopted and supported by the Government as well and the Taoiseach and the Minister for Finance enthusiastically endorse this approach.

It is about time we forgot about the past and dealt with the issues before us, but I remind people that in the 2007 general election the manifestos of all parties, which I have looked at carefully, spoke about further growth in the economy and greater investment. In fact, the Fine Gael Party decided it would spend the €25 billion from the National Pensions Reserve Fund, which would not have been a progressive step given that without that fund we would now be in worse trouble than we are.

It must be remembered that the economy and the country benefited from the investments that were made. I suggest to the Taoiseach that each Department take out space in the national media to publish the projects that were completed and funded between 1997 and 2010. People would be quite astonished by the size of the investment in the road from Dublin to Galway, for example. All the national primary routes have been built. These are a great investment and will bring crucial benefits to the country in the time ahead. Let us consider what was achieved during that period. The Department of Social and Family Affairs should publicise the achievements with regard to pensioners and the disabled, and every Department should do something similar. This may be seen by a political act by Departments; so be it. It would be difficult for political parties to provide the funds for this type of advertising. I suggest to Departments that they should try, one way or another, to get the facts out.

I will give an example. The General Register Office, which deals with births, marriages and deaths, has been decentralised to Roscommon. It has been installed in a new, state-of-the-art building in the town and is providing massive employment and associated benefits in the area. We built Castlerea Prison, which is commercially beneficial owing to the number of prison officers there. As chairman of the Western Health Board, I signed the contract for a state-of-the-art accident and emergency unit at Roscommon County Hospital, which was funded from moneys raised through levies and stamp duty on buildings. We also built a new swimming pool in Roscommon town. I am sure the Minister of State could list all the projects that were achieved in Carlow-Kilkenny during the same period of growth between 1997 and 2007, roughly a ten-year period. I would ask people which project they would have preferred not to have gone ahead during that time or which was not worth the investment. It would be worthwhile to bring to the public's attention where the money went.

We can talk, rightly, about the responsibility of the bankers, and for every irresponsible lender there was also an irresponsible borrower. Many developers provided substantial employment, however, something which is not recognised today. Developers seem to be the bogeymen as far as Ireland is concerned. I know one developer, Bernard McNamara, who developed the Shelbourne Hotel but also completed projects in Kerry, Galway and elsewhere. They were all fantastic projects that have provided employment.

I will give an example of how people are investing. Tourism is a priority at the moment. The Leenane Hotel is packed out this weekend and during the week because it is offering good deals. Many hotels in Dublin, including the O'Callaghan group, are flooded with Canadian and American tourists. There are great opportunities to bring more people into the country.

I have long been promoting the idea of a national solidarity bond, which was adopted in the 2009 budget. I mooted this, and the Minister accepted the proposal. A total of €255 million has been invested by 11,500 private individuals in the national solidarity bond since it was launched five months ago. A not dissimilar scheme, that of prize bonds, had raised around €1 billion by the end of 2009. This is of benefit as it means we do not have to borrow this money. There is an indication of strong loyalty in the State which is expressed in a willingness to invest in such schemes. It is estimated that people have about €90 billion in savings at this time. Along with the €10 billion left in the National Pensions Reserve Fund, this means there is a total of €100 billion in the State, which is a considerable sum of money. I encourage the Government to consider promoting the national solidarity bond abroad. There is no reason we cannot promote it in the USA or the UK. There are 40 million Irish Americans with great loyalty to Ireland. I am not saying it would solve all our borrowing requirements, but it would certainly reduce them if we could borrow directly from the public in the USA. It is simple to do this using the technology of on-line banking.

Saving is fine, but we also want to encourage people to spend. To create an incentive for spending, we should attach to the national solidarity bond a discount card, to be known as the Cáirde card. This card would allow the user access to reductions in hotel and possibly airline prices as well as in shops. Individual traders would sign up to the project. I am making this suggestion in the House today and I want the official from the Department of Finance to bring this to the attention of the Minister because it has potential. It is innovative and different. Everyone who participates in the solidarity bond scheme, whether he or she has invested €10,000, €50,000 or €100,000, would have a Cáirde card, and this would stimulate spending and indirectly create jobs. We want people to spend. I have further details about this proposal, which I will circulate to the House, and I will say more about it later. As someone said to me last night, the Department should also consider removing the deposit interest retention tax on national solidarity bond investments as a further incentive to invest in the scheme. I thank Members for their time. We have a lot of opportunities here and we should avail of them.