Richard O'Donoghue (Limerick County, Independent) | Oireachtas source

It is what the Government is doing. It is hypocritical. The Government is opening up the Dáil on Saturday for a change of Taoiseach from Tánaiste and the other way around. It could be done during the week. Anyone here would have accommodated it during the week. Even if it was late at night or early in the morning we would accommodate it. The Government is sending people home from here on Thursday and then bringing them back up on Saturday, when there are so many people around this country waiting for us to help them in constituencies. The Government wants us to come here for a party on a weekend when people and families are depending on us to come down to help them. Constituents in Limerick are expecting me for things we had planned for the past seven months so we could be there to help them that weekend, yet the Government plans this.

Then we see the Government had has €673 million not spent. This is after the Government has penalised every small business in the country and overtaxed them. They are not able to keep the lights on nor keep the fridges on in the butchers' shops, all because the funding has been done wrong and the Government has created more and more taxes for the people, putting small businesses out of business. We have seen it tonight with housing and the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien. All they could mention today was Dublin housing. It was Dublin, Dublin, Dublin. I asked them about Limerick and the Minister sat down speechless. He could not open his mouth then. He forgot it was outside of Dublin. Now some are being delivered in small bits around the country, but it is small bits and the crumbs off the table. The Minister, Deputy McGrath has been elected from outside Dublin. He must represent the whole country as one and stop representing Dublin. He must come back down to the counties that put him up in this House in the first place and in the party to which he was first elected to represent.

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