Thomas Byrne (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire ar ais go dtí an Teach arís inniu. We want to support this Bill. We believe it is important and that anyone who opposes it is opposing the will of the people in the referendum that was held some time ago. The Bill, effectively, was tied up in the fiscal treaty and there are some extra provisions in it but anyone who opposes it is going against the will of the people and that should be borne in mind.

The fiscal treaty rules give enhancement to what was always there in terms of the Stability and Growth Pact. We have a job as a nation to explain to our colleagues in Europe how the Stability and Growth Pact worked. France and Germany were the first to breach it and even at a party conference at the weekend with some of our European colleagues it came as a considerable shock to some of them that Ireland was fully in compliance with the Stability and Growth Pact throughout the years of the Fianna Fáil Governments until 2008. That is not say that everything we were doing was right, rather quite the opposite, it says that the rules were wrong, they did not go far enough and were not enforced in many countries. That is a point that needs to be hammered home repeatedly particularly with Germany and to a lesser extent with France which is more supportive of us.

The new set of rules we are enacting, and that the people effectively enacted, address the deficiency with the original Stability and Growth Pact by setting out an automatic corrective mechanism which will be very difficult on governments. If the rules had been in place before 2008, I hope we would not have reached levels of public expenditure that would have required such a huge correction, but if it had come into force in 2008 it would have resulted in a massive correction in public expenditure. We have got to get to a position where we do not allow that to happen again. Bringing in these rules at this point in the economic cycle should help in that respect.

The currency of the Union is still vulnerable to destabilising financial flows and credit bubbles in regional areas, and that may well be currently happening in some European countries. It is not happening here, in France, Spain, Portugal or Greece - it has happened already. There has been talk about a property bubble arising in some of the northern European countries. It is worth bearing in mind that these things can still happen. They have happened in the past and history can repeat itself.

The Bill establishes the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council on a statutory footing and everyone will praise that and say it is a great move but the fact of the matter is that it has been on a non-statutory footing for the past while. I believe it has issued two major reports. Those on the council have not been listened to; they have been completely dismissed by the Taoiseach and kind of dismissed by the Minister as well. I wonder what these people who are highly regarded economists - not all of them are from Ireland, some of them have to fly over here to meetings - think when they produce this important information for the public to try to prevent the crisis we are in from happening again and to keep this country on the straight and narrow and they are not listened to by the Government. One wonders what is the point of this. Some of the reaction from Government to previous reports of the fiscal council has been insulting, to put it mildly.

The fiscal council must become known and trusted by the public and the people must listen to what it says because those on it will not always say things that are palatable to the citizens. They will be providing information in many cases that will not be at all palatable and that will result in further cuts than what the Government proposes.

We will support the Bill. We support the fiscal treaty. My party leader played a huge role in that referendum and I pay tribute to him for doing that. It is partially his role in that respect that has allowed us to move forward and set out this Bill to comply with our European obligations to get it passed, as was the will of the people, and to move on to the other urgent matters that are on the Minister's agenda.