Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

They will vote against the injustice of the water charges and the Government's failure to listen to what the people have said on that issue. They will vote against the equally cruel, unjust and regressive universal social charge and home taxes. They will vote against the cruelty of leaving people needing vital operations on waiting lists for over a year. They will vote against the fact that we have some of the most overcrowded classrooms in Europe and that all of this has been done when the big corporate investors in property and landlords are coining it and while hundreds of thousands of our citizens cannot put an affordable roof over their head and people are dying on the streets. They do this as the Government refuses, point blank, to levy even a small amount of extra tax on the super-wealthy or the corporations which are making absolute fortunes. That is why people are protesting and the Government has already lost the real vote of confidence from the people in this country. No matter what game or manipulation happens in this Parliament, the Taoiseach should remember that real power lies with the people and real change has always come from the people mobilising on the street. Reforms have been won in recent weeks because people have gone on the streets and refused to accept water charges or expressed their outrage against the homelessness crisis. That is more than anything achieved by the Government in the past four years and more reforms will be won as those protests continue. It is about time the Government listened to them.

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