Barry Andrews (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

I welcome the Labour Party motion. I always pay attention to what my colleague in Dún Laoghaire, Deputy Gilmore, has to say, having shared council time with him many years ago. On this occasion a selective series of facts was brought before the House to prove a conclusion that had already been reached. It was an unscientific extrapolation of a theory that was highly political in its exclusion of salient facts that may have got in the way of the previously conceived theory, namely that the Government is not doing what it should do. For example, they excluded the fact that house price inflation was 40% per annum at the end of the rainbow coalition's term in power and is now down to 6% or 7%.

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