SIPTU General President, Jack O’Connor, has described the Finance Bill published on Wednesday (8th February) as “deeply disappointing and a lost opportunity”.
The supports to new starts ups, to indigenous exporters, to FDI, to the international financial services industry and to R&D activities in SME’s may well provide a boost to all these sectors, but the impacts are likely to be very small in scale and are narrowly targeted, he said.
“Unfortunately, this Finance Bill ignores the potential benefit of infrastructural investment to the Irish economy and casts a blind eye to the possibility of incentivising the country’s private pension schemes to provide the finance for this,” Jack O’Connor said.
With some €70bn on the balance sheets of Irish private pension funds and an infrastructure gap in the area of broadband, energy retrofitting and water treatment that have yet to be fully resourced and financed, the Government could have taken steps to incentivise the commitment of these funds towards projects in Ireland, he said.
“This would have had a significant economy wide impact through the procurement of services, goods and the generation of employment.
“An imaginative approach would have found a way of generating tens of thousands of jobs by exempting from the Pension Levy funds which invest more than 5% of their assets in the development of vital infrastructure and job creation. This could amount to some €3 billion to €4 billion in the generation of tens of thousands of new jobs.
“Unfortunately, the Government has ignored this opportunity, amid an unemployment rate of more than 14%, while €70 billion ofIrish pension fund investments are contributing to the development of other economies across the world,” Jack O’Connor said.
“It is still not too late to rectify this at the Committee Stage of the Bill.”