Call for Opposition to have positive attitude

Taoiseach Bertie Ahern called on the Opposition to have a more positive attitude to life and not to be so negative about infrastructural development.

He made the call as Fine Gael's finance spokesman Richard Bruton claimed that the Government was only meeting 20 per cent of its annual development targets and that Ireland was the bottom of the league in key infrastructural areas.

Mr Ahern said that "we should aim to motivate the entire system instead of trying to find another report to show we are lower down in the list. This is a very negative attitude which kept us where we were since the 1920s.

"Our attitude was that this country could never do things. If one has that negative attitude to life, one will always believe everything is a failure."

Mr Bruton said the Government failed in about 80 per cent of its annual infrastructural targets and "each year when we read the National Competitiveness Council's annual report we see we are bottom of the league on port infrastructure, broadband infrastructure and in a host of other key infrastructural areas".

The Taoiseach hoped that department officials involved in such projects would not "spend their time either looking at EU reports or statistical analyses of an academic exercise that is useless to the people".

He said that "by the end of this decade, the targets will be achieved for the Cork, Limerick and Galway roads".