Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

That is an easy critique to put forward. It is easy to suggest that the number of jobs went down despite continued investment at a time of declining employment in a recession. The truth is that companies and job creation do not have an indefinite life. Jobs do not last forever. Companies merge and change and certain projects succeed. A project that remains in the country for seven years probably repays the Exchequer at a ratio of 5:1, not to mention the impact in corporate tax and so on. There is a strong bang for the buck in supporting enterprise development. Rather than the macro argument to the effect that jobs went down and costs went up and ergo the strategy does not work, we should examine individual programmes and come up with ideas for improving them. Certainly, I am open to hearing critiques of programmes or the management of individual programmes and I will consider these. However, the use of crude top-line numbers does not convince me. If there are criticisms I am willing to engage with them because I recognise that no organisation is perfect.

The case is similar with research and development, R&D, returns. This has defied people the world over. Ireland is not unique in finding it difficult to find measurable indicators of the impact of R&D. Nonetheless, one half of IDA investments now come with R&D elements. Some €500 million of investment in R&D capability by multinationals comes to Ireland each year. One of the reasons they come is because they can lock into the capability of established research centres in Ireland and the sort of people who are emerging as fourth level graduates. This is a difficult area but I fully accept Senator Barrett's challenge. As Chris Horn said, we must turn our R&D spend from a shipbuilding yard into an admiralty. We have spent many years launching individual research projects which are seaworthy and which will happily sail off but we must become strategic and turn them into an admiralty which actually delivers. That is the best way of describing what research prioritisation is about. That is the challenge in this area.

Senator Reilly focused on emigration. I do not dispute that this is the biggest issue and represents some of the most tangible evidence of our economic failure in recent years. That is the reason this process is so important to get us back to strong enterprises, exporting capability and the ability to innovate and to win new markets. These are at the heart of the plan.

I am somewhat unclear about Senator Reilly's point on Structural Funds from Europe. I presume the Senator was suggesting that Europe keeps referring to growth strategies but she cannot see the substance of it. That is a fair point. We need a more credible growth strategy from Europe. On the other hand, one must acknowledge that the European Central Bank, under its new management, is a great deal more pro-growth. We have seen the banks become underpinned. Rates are now coming down because the European Central Bank is taking a different view. Now, we have the chance to put in place a treaty which gets countries to sign up to reasonable rules of behaviour. Those two things go hand in hand. The treaty is about retrofitting to the eurozone a system that makes the euro able to respond to crises. What has been manifest in the last 12 months and more is that the eurozone was not designed to deal with a crisis that probably should have been anticipated but was not. We need, therefore, to retrofit a system to respond to that. That is what a lot of the process of getting back to a growth strategy is about. We must get the eurozone properly underpinned, which is at the heart of what is going on in this treaty debate. It is frustrating and slow but it is changing. If one looks back to Europe's attitude to the crisis two years ago and where it is now, one can see it has moved a great distance. We are moving towards resolving these issues.

There needs to be more imagination regarding the type of growth initiatives that come from Europe. It is a continuing challenge for the EU. Every time we hear the Taoiseach in Europe, he is continually emphasising that agenda, which includes questions such as what we can do for small businesses, how we can get banks lending again, what changes we should introduce to make our markets work better, how we open up new foreign areas and how we can use Europe's huge funding in research and development capability to better effect. These are major challenges that we face as a community.

I answered Senator White's question when she was not here.