Paschal Mooney (Fianna Fail)

I am grateful to the Minister for her clarity. I can understand the reasons and motivation behind Senator Healy Eames's amendment. I pose the question in the context of the Minister's emphasis, and rightly so, on consumer confidence. As the Minister will be aware, as late as this morning or yesterday, the latest consumer confidence index shows a 2% drop from 58% down to 56%. I understand that a measure at 50% or less is into deflationary territory. I presume the Government is hoping the next CSO figure will show an increase in consumer confidence. Keeping in mind that the Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan, was quoted over the weekend and last week suggesting that people should get out and spend more, it was rather salutary that the vox pop interviews carried out for the weekend news programmes at various shopping centres showed the majority of those interviewed as being unemployed. This was somewhat poignant as they were going around shopping centres with hardly one bag which had nothing in it. The challenges for the Government include the breakdown in consumer confidence.

I agree in principle that some form of evaluation should be carried out. The Minister may be receiving information by way of the CSO statistics that, if consumer confidence is rising, this indicates at least that the measures are having an effect. I could not help but reflect on the time when the former Minister, Mary Harney, suggested people should shop around and as a result the whole world dumped on top of her. Like Mary Harney, the Minister, Deputy Noonan, was making what I regarded as a very sensible request and it is interesting to note the negative reaction. He is absolutely right, in my view. A total of €120 billion is held in savings accounts in the country, an increase from €98 billion a year ago. The figures were quite constant up to three or four years ago, with somewhere in the order of 4% of the national wealth being in savings and with it now being at 12% or 13%. This is a very high figure. One can only deduce from those figures that it is not the elite, the super-rich, who are saving but ordinary people.

The special savings initiative which ran for five years has been long forgotten. It was, effectively, the Government giving money away. In the immediate aftermath of the termination of the scheme in 2007 and 2008, all economists were suggesting there would be a splurge of spending and that the economy would benefit to the tune of billions of euro but, in fact, people were much more cautious, even in 2007 and 2008. They did not go out and spend to the extent anticipated. They were very careful in how they husbanded their money. They paid off debts and whatever they spent had a value-added dimension, such as house extensions. According to the consumer statistics at the time they did not go off on foreign holidays to the same extent nor did they buy new cars. Perhaps there is an inherent caution within the Irish psyche which was not identified until recent years, that irrespective of the economic difficulties, we are a little like the Germans, and that perhaps we save our money. We have been advising people to save their money and now we are trying to turn them around, like turning an oil tanker in the middle of the Atlantic.

I am sure the Government is looking at this issue of the €120 billion. It must be very frustrating to see this pile of money sitting there and which is non-productive in a sense and even a small portion of which would help to maintain and expand the job market. This may be a debate for another day but it was important to put this on the record of the House because it is part of the overall picture which this particular section of the Bill is attempting to address. As I said on Second Stage and my colleagues said in the other House, we support the Government in any initiative in this regard because it will be for the benefit of all. I wish the Government a fair wind.