Sean Barrett (Independent)

I welcome the Minister. It is not the first time we have had such a discussion. I recall meeting the Minister's brother when we were writing a better way to plan the nation's finances and I then served on the group that produced the Culliton report some time after that. The approach has been around for some time. I am delighted the Minister is doing this every year.

I encourage him to please be radical. I am sure he would have the support of the House for that because this is a problem which is deep-seated. The 300,000 plus unemployed to whom the Minister referred includes 23,000 gone from agriculture and 65,000 from industry, which peaked in 2007 at 299,000 and is down to 233,000. We all know that construction is down by 164,000. The retail trade is minus 42,000 and accommodation and food, due to the decline in tourism, is minus 24,000. This is the serious problem of an economy that just got totally uncompetitive.

I spoke in Enniskillen on Friday and I looked at some of the minutes of Fermanagh District Council. It had a contract for work on the airport in Enniskillen and it showed me how uncompetitive we are in this country. The winning tender for architectural services was £6,875 sterling. The average of five tenders from the Republic was £36,890. For structural engineering services, the winning tender in the North was £6,075 - the average of our 13 was £19,859. A mechanical and electrical engineering contract at the airport was £1,981. The two tenders from the Republic were £22,500 and £32,500. We have a serious competitiveness problem and we must address how we reached this point.

The reform of banking has been too slow. Mr. Elderfield attended a meeting of the finance committee. I believed that the new directors of the banks were to have been installed by 1 January. The banks brought us to the brink.

Regarding the failures in our system of public administration, there should never again be an incorporeal Cabinet meeting. There is no such provision in law. We must be prepared for when pressure is placed on the Government to accept offers of the type that did such serious damage to the country. It was probably the most successful rent-seeking or lobbying episode every accomplished.

We need a central office of project evaluation. The Irish Times published a list yesterday. Individual Departments being captured by client groups promoting their pet projects is not good enough. As the Minister correctly stated, it all adds up to a loss in economic competitiveness. The interest groups gain, as their pockets are filled, and the bureaucracy involved can expand, but that approach is bad for the rest of the country.

We need to consider reforming the permanent government. The Wright report found that, regrettably, only 7% of the senior staff of the Department of Finance had qualifications in economics. We need qualified people to undertake these serious tasks. We cannot let public administration off the hook in respect of, for example, the McLaughlin report, which found seriously excessive managerial costs in local government. Charging for septic tanks, waste disposal and water is one part of the equation, but the other is considering the report's findings. The Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Deputy Hogan, and the Minister of State, Deputy O'Dowd, are interested in this matter but work is not progressing quickly enough.

Each Bill should be subject to a regulatory impact analysis, RIA, of whether it will add to the cost of doing business. Should we intervene to save property prices from falling or should we let them fall sooner rather than later, a question that also includes downward rent reviews? It would return the economy to competitiveness.

We have an agency problem. Dr. Chris Horn has pointed out that more than half of Enterprise Ireland's budget is spent internally. The percentage of the IDA's budget that is spent on its running is also increasing rapidly and the percentage that goes to firms is declining. These agencies must become more productive.

According to Mr. Damien Kiberd's estimates, we gave approximately €10 billion to firms that employed 50,000 fewer people in 2009 than they did ten years prior to that. It is not just a question of additional PR, as we must insist on value for money in the grant-awarding agencies. They should not be the focus. Instead, job creation should be the focus. In this regard, we have been failing for a variety of reasons.

I caution the Minister on tax lawyers and accountants. They abstract a vast amount of money from the country's tax base. Dr. Michael Collins estimates it amounts to approximately €12.8 billion. The Culliton report stated:

... the competitive edge of Irish industry has been blunted as effort and energy have been distracted from the proper emphasis on serving the market and achieving high productivity into maximising the grant or tax benefit. Tax avoidance and grant maximisation are the directly unproductive activities (or rent seeking in the economist's jargon) par excellence.