Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)

Tens of thousands were heartlessly priced out of the market by the speculators who financed the parties opposite. Tens of thousands are terrified of the mortgage increases — perhaps up to €200 a month — they fear are now due. That amounts to €2,400 a year, which will virtually impoverish them but it is cigar money to the wealthy people who finance the Taoiseach. Most shamefully, look at how Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats were obliging the Shell Oil Corporation this morning, manhandling the decent people of Erris, so that Shell, the most notorious polluter and profiteer virtually on the globe, can get the gas they have given it for nothing out of the sea. This process started with the then Minister, Mr. Ray Burke, in 1997 and continued in 1992 under the Minister for Finance, now Taoiseach, when they gave fabulous natural resources to these companies for absolutely nothing in secret deals. How much did Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats get from the oil companies?

How nauseating, in view of all this, to see Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats, the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste, reduce this whole controversy, this nexus of patronage and sleaze, to a cynical game of scrabble, of bending and twisting words so that both parties can walk out claiming to be vindicated. Taking large amounts of money from business, as the Taoiseach has said today, was an error and a misjudgment not because it was wrong, not because there was a massive conflict of interest, but because it came out into the open and caused grief and consternation to the Taoiseach and his friends. The Tánaiste and leader of the Progressive Democrats sits beside him and applauds that particular statement.

What the Tánaiste is doing today is propping up an unreconstructed Fianna Fáil Party, still defending sleaze after ten years of investigation. Was it for this that the Tánaiste flew to the tops of the lamp posts all over Dublin to tell us we needed him in Government to straighten out the Fianna Fáil chancers? That event has now been exposed for the hollow stunt that it was.

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