Liam Twomey (Wexford, Fine Gael)

The Minister of State can say what he likes but the hard fact remains that the Government has perpetrated a deliberate fraud in the past three years and effectively stolen €7 billion from taxpayers in order to buy next year's general election.

I will provide a history lesson. In the 1997 budget Deputy Quinn, Minister for Finance in the then Fine Gael-Labour Party Government, returned €800 million to taxpayers. That was the first occasion in the history of the State on which a Government paid back so much to taxpayers. In March 1997, three months before Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats came to power, like today, the headlines in the national newspapers referred to growth in the economy, spiralling house prices and the Central Bank's concern that growth was driving inflation upwards. If Deputy Quinn could pay back €800 million in 1997, based on the information in his possession on the economy which was growing at the time, what is the Government's purpose in taxing the people by in excess of €7 billion in the past three years? The budget is a fraud and represents nothing more than an exercise to buy the next general election.

We can make allowances for the fact that calculations in respect of a budget might be out by €100 million or €200 million. However, the past three budgets have been out by €2 billion. That represents either incompetence or a scam. I do not understand how the Government's calculations could have been so consistently wrong during the past three years.

See this speech in context