Sean Barrett (Independent)

We put on a special performance for the Minister of State this afternoon. I thank all my colleagues for their comments. Some of the compliments were fulsome. They reminded me of something Dr. McDowell of TCD said when he attended a funeral and listened to the eulogy. He said: "I must be at the wrong funeral because I knew the diseased".

The Fiscal Advisory Council already has a Barrett serving on it and there is not a need for it to have two. Alan Barrett along with John McHale, Donal Donovan, Róisín O'Sullivan and Sebastian Barnes of the OECD most ably serve on it.

I thank the Minister of State for his response. I note he will bring forward legislation and that he is engaged in genuine dialogue most thoroughly on the points we covered here. I hope the Bill he brings forward in the first quarter of next year will correspond to the requirements of my Bill. We will also engage with the Fiscal Advisory Council through the finance committee as Senator Hayden mentioned. We had a meeting with the representatives of the troika during their visit here in October. We are ad idem in pressing forward with this important measure because nobody wants to be in this situation ever again. I will not be pressing the issue at this stage.

I hope I have not used up the four minutes allotted and that there is time remaining for this debate to continue in the spring. This debate has been more valuable and it is vital. The IMF probably overlooks Parliament. We have a huge role to play in getting this country set up again. We have always assured all the reforming Ministers who have come here that this will be one of our functions. We are assisting the Minister, Deputy Reilly, on some health issues that arose in the Milliman report and the Minister of State, Deputy Ring, on tourism matters. We will help where we can because we all have the one goal which is to ensure that this country could perform, for example, like Sweden. Senator Ó Clochartaigh was a bit pessimistic. Sweden has a nominal growth of 5% per annum and a gross debt of 36% of GDP and it had a strong fiscal council. Let us set that as our target and all work together.

I thank everybody, the Cathaoirleach, the Leader, the Bills Office who helped us, and Dr. Charles Larkin, my assistant, who did much of the research on it with the younger economists. I believe the Minister of State will find as he reaches out to them, they will be more than pleased to assist the Government in any way they can to have fiscal responsibility enshrined in legislation in rules with openness before the Parliament and Parliament fully participating. It was the closed system, as several Senators said, that got us into so much trouble. We are in the great tradition of Burke, Grattan, Daniel O'Connell and Parnell. We have done a lot in Parliaments and restoring the economy of this country is a task which this Parliament should embrace.