Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State back to the House for the second time today. I believe that we will be seeing him regularly for the rest of the week.

Fianna Fáil is supporting this Bill. There are four Senators on this side of the Chamber, along with the Cathaoirleach and the Minister of State. The four Senators were on the finance committee when this Bill was discussed a number of months ago and it is nice to see a Bill coming through the finance committee and making its way into the system. Hopefully it will be passed on Thursday.

It is very important that Ireland is part of the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. While Asia is geographically a long way from us and will never be the market that the UK is for us - regardless of Brexit - it is important that we look at rapidly growing markets further afield which are rapidly increasing in their monetary wealth per head. I do not believe that any of us realise how vast China is. India and Pakistan, among others, are enormously large countries, with 600 to 800 million populations. China has over 1 billion people. A new power station opens in China every four days. There are markets and opportunities there. As a First World country, it is our responsibility to provide overseas development aid contributions and do our best to make a statement that we are interested in helping countries that are not as fortunate as our own. The figures here are very small. It is €25 million paid in over five years, €5 million a year. We do many things which cost much more than €5 million and get considerably less scrutiny than we are giving this Bill. I do not want to repeat everything the Minister of State said in his very comprehensive speech. It is important to acknowledge that there are regional and non-regional members. Helping these countries is not bad for us as we are also getting involved. We are not just giving away money; we are investing in a bank that will invest in projects. By and large the bank will be investing in projects it expects to generate a return. Its purpose is not just to give away money; it is to invest in projects. It is similar to the EIB but in an Asian context.

I believe we do €11 billion in trade annually with China. By comparison, trade with the UK is between €1.2 billion and €1.4 billion a week. However, it is still a substantial amount of money and we should not ignore the area. The Bill needs to be passed. I will not go through the various articles of agreement, the operations, the finances, the board of governors and various other provisions. We did a lot of that at the committee. It was important that we did so. We went through it and looked at the benefits. It is clear from the Minister of State's speech that the Department has gone through much of this stuff. We scrutinised it. I am happy to support it. I look forward to it being passed this week, allowing Ireland to play a small but significant part in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.