Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

-----but it also got many things wrong. After five years in here trying to change some of the things I and the Social Democrats believe they got wrong, my conclusion is that at the heart of the errors the previous Government made was a failure of ideology. Allowing a republic where one child in nine lives in daily poverty to continue is not a failure of policy, it is a failure of ideology. Designing and implementing five regressive budgets in a row that asked those who had the least to bear the greatest burden was a choice. It was a very damaging choice and it was a failure of ideology. Selling more than 13,000 family mortgages from IBRC to vulture funds, many of whom are now having to deal with those vulture funds who are making very serious profits, rather than facilitating the families when every other situation had to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis was a failure of ideology.

Campaigning to cut taxes at a time when parents are putting their children to sleep in the back of cars is a failure of ideology. That failure of ideology continues through to the leaked document we saw outlining tax cuts to investment ratios of 1:2. The previous Government, Fine Gael in particular, campaigned on a slogan that we have to make work pay. It is one of the three pillars of its 130-page manifesto, Making Work Pay. The ideology says that if one taxes people for working, one is disincentivising them from working so they will not work and one has to make it pay for them to work. However, objective, impartial analysis from the OECD says that Ireland has between the lowest and the fourth lowest tax wedge, tax on work, in the OECD, depending on what type of family one is in. The Government that is coming in now is backed up by a document whereby it is going to continue with tax cuts to make work pay, because presumably work does not pay. At a time when one in nine children are living in poverty and we are dealing with a homelessness crisis, when there are not enough gardaí on the streets, it is not just a failure of policy, it is an absolute failure of ideology.

The Social Democrats – I am sure with many others here – would love to be in government. We would love to be driving policy but we do not see evidence that the ideology has changed. As other Members have referenced before, there are some welcome phrases that it is hoped will be followed through in this coming Dáil, but what we do not see is a change in the ideology that has led to an awful lot of very bad things happening to a lot of vulnerable people in this country in the past five years.

I hope we are at a time where we can start rebuilding society. If we are to rebuild a republic that genuinely provides every single man, woman and child with dignity and opportunity, then we need to do it with a different ideology based on values of dignity, genuine equality and democracy.

2 o’clock

Consequently, for this reason and many others, we in the Social Democrats do not believe the ideological basis of what Members are about to see will be good for this country and for that reason, we will vote against this Government.

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