Brian Ó Domhnaill (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. This debate gives us an opportunity to reflect on the Government's recent announcement, the spring statement, which focused on expenditure and income from a public finance point of view. I apologise at the outset for being a little late. I was at another meeting. Earlier, we had a discussion in the House and I spoke to the Leader on the need for a vision for the country and how we spend our money going forward, whether on the revenue or capital side. We need to set a plan for the country, and to involve the people, in terms of reducing the deficit or spending any additional revenues that may become available as a result of increased tax revenues as a result of people returning to work with a consequent reduction in the strain on social welfare. Every citizen should be involved in that.

The spring statement was a good document, but there was nothing new announced in it. In reality, it is probably a springboard to accelerate the Government into an election cycle. Having said that and having read the statement, the Government will depend on citizens if it is to include everyone in the recovery and to reap the fruits. I was taken aback that entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship was not mentioned at all in the document. Self-employment was only cited once. I have a copy of the document here. I do not understand that as we should be trying to promote an indigenous entrepreneurial spirit within the country. As such, I was taken aback that the self-employed were not mentioned. Part-time workers who are in a crucial category in terms of upskilling and setting up their own businesses were only mentioned twice in the document. Again, we are depending on people to lift the country forward, yet these two cohorts of workers and entrepreneurs were only mentioned in passing.

The Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan, referred to the need to be prudent and to the outlook for various expansionary budgets, as he termed them, between now and 2020, depending, of course, on revenues being made available. The Minister spoke of an increased availability of resources of between €1.2 billion and €1.5 billion for the 2016 budget. He spoke about a 50:50 split in terms of that money coming from tax revenue and savings. It does not make a lot of sense and I would like an explanation. If one looks at where we have been heretofore, the projection does not stack up. It has not been 50:50 to date. In fact, the deficit reduction was brought about in the 2014-15 fiscal cycle by a 50% increase in taxation, 4% GDP growth, a 9% reduction in Government expenditure and 27% from other factors.

Job creation and wealth creation are key to the future economic prosperity of the country. I fully agree with the Minister of State that we need to create a culture of allowing people to work. We need to cut the burden on those who are self-employed to give them a cushion for taking risk. We must cut tax burdens across the board to try to get the entrepreneurial spirit motivated. In doing that, we must ensure that the benefits of prosperity are shared by all irrespective of where a person lives or to what social class he or she belongs.

Unfortunately, that is where the Government is getting it drastically wrong. There has been a non-existent focus in Government spending on the regions. Any economist will tell one that for every €1 spent by the public sector, the private sector will spend at least €1.30 on top of that. If the focus of Government expenditure is the capital and other cities and not the regions, we will not have economic development in the regions or balanced regional job creation. We saw in the recent NERI report that 94,000 jobs were created over a 12 month period, of which 95% were created in Dublin or the commuter belt.