Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

When this debate started earlier this evening I was afraid that I would be bored. I am happy to say that I am no longer bored because I am shocked. I am shocked at the loss of memory, the collective amnesia among the Opposition. Looking back ten years is one thing, but I cannot even rely on them to look back five years and to recall with any kind of accuracy what the situation was.

I am very fond of Deputy Boyd Barrett because he has some good ideas. It is just that when he puts them into operation it is like flying a kite upside down. It does not work that way, so you have to go the opposite route. The thing that takes me to the fair most of all is the point that the previous Fine Gael-Labour Party Government, the subsequent Government and the present Government should have done more, but I ask the question, with what? Does nobody recall that there was no money in the banks and no money to be got out of the banks? There was no credit. We had no credit rating. Mr. Modi was in Government Buildings working out a way to salvage the country, if it could be salvaged. The problem is that nobody seems to remember that now.

I worry about the philosophy behind the thinking when we come to that. You cannot go into a bank and say you are from People Before Profit and that you should get money because you want to spend it. Any cause is a good cause, but they are never going to pay it back, because there is no substance to the argument. I am sorry to have to say that, but it is a fact. Deputy Boyd Barrett knows that himself because he is a reasonable and shrewd guy. I give him full credit for that. It takes a little bit of doing to be able to say that with a straight face.

I want to remind people that some of us were talking about the crash long before it came. The crash is what left us where we are. We got one hell of a belt and we had to drag ourselves up by the bootlaces and struggle on. Then Covid came on top of that again, just to remind us that we were not going to be left alone for too long. When I think back, I used to wake up every morning and wonder if the people in Government Buildings were going to come to any kind of a conclusion that would be to our advantage. We waited, and every time we switched on the television, there were one or two of these guys walking across the street with large, bulging bags, and it was not money that was in them, it was documents. We had failed to run our economy because we did not do what should have been done at the time. We did not manage it. I remember the Minister for Finance saying at the time to somebody across the House that the economy was like a bank, you had to manage it. It was ironic. They needed the banks to be managed, not the economy.

I am not blaming the politicians. I have pointed this out on several occasions. A number of us put down questions to find out what the hell was going wrong. I got one answer to a question in about four years that clearly indicated to me that the fat was in the fire and we were in deep trouble. What I cannot understand is why some of the Opposition in here now do not remember that far back. It is only seven or eight years ago. Why did they not raise those questions? It was to the advantage of the people of the country to be able to raise those questions and say we cannot dig a hole any deeper than it is now.

It is on that point that I want to turn the argument to the future. If some of the philosophies now being put forward are carried through, if the people give an opportunity to our colleagues here to put them into operation, there will be desolation. Venezuela will be like the garden of paradise. There will be nothing like it. It will be an absolute economic desert. That is not going to come until such time as the lending institutions, the international financiers and the people in this country suddenly realise this thing is not what it was made out to be at all. These people do not have an economic plan and they do not have the superior knowledge that they claim to have. They have ideology. It does not count. It is hard facts, brass tacks, that count. We must have a debate that relates to how the economy is managed, how we can spend money that we can afford and how we cannot just go around to people on a door-to-door basis and say we want their money, we have a good idea and we will tell them all about it later. Look at what happened before. Do we want to repeat that? Does anyone in this room want to repeat that and to suffer the indignity of the position we were in?

I remember being called to a meeting in Brussels at that time along with a number of other people. I do not know why I was called. They probably felt that I needed to be beaten up. All of the member states were there, and they castigated this country for what we did and the implications for the rest of the European Union. They were angry. Many people, some who were near neighbours, despised us and ridiculed us on the basis that we were not able to manage the economy, yet here we are going back the same route again. Have we learned nothing at all? Surely, we should have learned something and that it is not that far away that we cannot remember 2007. In 2007 the country was flat broke, and nobody wanted to accept it. In 2005 the country was flat broke, and it still went on. I despair at the debate that we have had for the last half an hour or so. If it is that bad, that we cannot remember what went wrong and we cannot accept it, then we are quite liable to do the same daft things again. It would be stupid if we go down that route.