Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will come to that because I will tell the Senator that the reason we were able to allocate an extra €2 billion on top of what the previous Minister of State had secured for housing in the previous budget was because of a jobs recovery. I will not claim credit for all that. The private sector created all the jobs but there are an extra 230,000 jobs, which is more than there were three or four years ago. How has that happened? It is because of a combination of reasons but a key part of that is that we have always identified in our budgets that every change we made to the tax system was done with an eye on job creation. It has worked well and I have no problems standing over the decisions we made in the budget over the past three or four years. They are not tax breaks for the rich. They are tax initiatives to create jobs and they have been proven to work.