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

It is a rather perverse notion of success against a background of 14% unemployment and crippling austerity which is being imposed on ordinary people. One can balance books by making people suffer. To take an extreme example, if we wiped out whole sections of the population you could probably balance the books, but it would be on the basis of extreme suffering, so it is rather perverse. Surely the only criteria for success would be what the Minister is going to do to deal with the unemployment situation or to ease the level of suffering people are feeling. Examining the tables for unemployment, we are looking at the continuation of mass unemployment for the foreseeable future, with only very small reductions in the best case scenario. Is that not a pretty bleak outlook? Is the best case scenario not hopelessly optimistic? For example, the Minister says the baseline assumption is one in which a modest international recovery takes hold in the second half of this year.