This Government has taken an economic model that was the envy of the world and destroyed it. It was destroyed not by some international tsunami from abroad but by a bog-standard property bubble that was entirely homemade. As the governor of the Central Bank has found, official policy added fuel to the fire and heightened the vulnerability of the economy.

Catastrophic Budgetary policy was central to the collapse. Public spending was consciously expanded at a faster rate than the economy could support. The damage done to competitiveness was ignored. The public were led to believe that the party would last forever. The property bubble that was bringing in new tax revenue was urged on by a Minister for Finance who resisted closing down these tax reliefs. To court popularity, government became more and more reliant on a narrow range of volatile taxes. In the end a quarter of all tax revenue was coming from the building sector.

The financial regulatory structure that was created to defend the interests of ordinary members of the public was totally unequal to the arrogant swagger of those who believed they were invincible. The internal systems of the banks were easily corrupted by buccaneering methods and the regulators just doffed their hat. The cold truth is that a political culture has been created in Ireland where a powerful elite has had easy access, and were in a position to promote their own narrow interests at the expense of the wider public good.

People didn’t need to be told about the destruction that is being wrought by failed politics. In just over two years, national income has fallen by 28% and investment by 101%. Almost 300,000 jobs have been lost and 150,000 people have emigrated.

This has been a young person’s recession most of all. Over 90% of the jobs lost have been among people under the age of 35. These are the people who should be the building blocks of a strong economic future. Instead the lucky ones have been able to leave to seek work elsewhere. Many remain locked in by their commitment to mortgages on houses that they will never see the price they paid again.

The persistent denial of culpability by this Government does nothing for their credibility if they aspire to lead us out of this crisis. Their response to date is the response of prisoners of a failed past.

The world has changed, but policy remedies that they have instinctively reached for are simply not equal to the task. Having created this crisis by running a pro-cyclical fiscal policy and pampering to the needs of the banking sector, they now insist that the solution to the crisis is simply again to operate pro-cyclical fiscal policies, which are now making the recession worse, and again pamper to the needs of failed banks and their investors.

The reason why such catastrophic failures occurred in Ireland is that Ministers believed it was a virtue to fly by the seat of their pants. This was the prevailing philosophy pushed by Fianna Fail just as the economy was committing to be part of the euro zone. It was a catastrophic misjudgement.

Just as the country was committing to join a hard currency regime and to behave in future more like Germans in our approach to economic management, this Government started to sow the seeds of economic destruction. Fiscal adventurism, runaway credit growth, a property bubble, and the destruction of competiveness are the legacy that has wrought such appalling damage to the lives of ordinary people. The challenge for Ireland now is to develop a coherent jobs strategy.

Economic planning has not been in vogue in Ireland in recent years. In good times it was seen as a quaint folly, in bad times it has been avoided because everyone is so busy and times are so uncertain. It’s ironic that Ministers who pour scorn on a person opening a corner shop without a business plan, seem quite content to run their government, which is at the centre of the entire economic web, without any chart or compass without a clear destination in mind.

Fine Gael has laid down the key components of the sort of recovery plan that Ireland needs:

• Bold investment in key arteries;
• New ways to get credit flowing to business;
• Cutting the cost for employers of taking on new recruits;
• A Competitiveness Action Plan;
• Aggressive removal of bottlenecks that hamper key sectors.

Speech by Fine Gael Enterprise Spokesman Richard Bruton TD on the Fine Gael Private Members’ Motion on the Economy in Dáil Éireann on Tuesday 6th July